


To Suffer Woes Which Hope Thinks Infinite

by AliceInKinkland



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Episode: s06e17 Wrongs Darker Than Death Or Night, F/M, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Occupation of Bajor, Sexual Slavery, Temporary Character Death, Terok Nor (Star Trek), Time Loop, Time Travel, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:40:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27672151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInKinkland/pseuds/AliceInKinkland
Summary: When Kira seeks the help of the Prophets to learn what truly happened between her mother and Dukat, she finds herself stuck in a time loop.
Relationships: Dukat/Kira Meru, Kira Meru & Kira Nerys
Comments: 40
Kudos: 24
Collections: Women of Star Trek





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my two wonderful beta readers: 
> 
> [ClaireCroi/Anna Asmodeus](https://anna-asmodeus.tumblr.com/), my "I haven't seen this episode in years" test audience, relationship complexity advisor, and good friend, and
> 
> Jeremy, my combat writing coach, Dukat dialogue consultant, and amazing partner.

**One**

When Kira requested this orb experience, she expected there to be some separation between herself and the world of the past, but the moment the Orb of Time deposits her into the heart of the Singha refugee centre, it all comes rushing back.

The smell hits her first, cave dampness and sweat and urine and watery pea soup, and then the rest of her senses catch up and she sees children with distended bellies playing in the dirt and oh, she is angry. It is a familiar rage, righteous and comforting. Kira wraps it tight around herself like an unwashed blanket, allowing it to warm her.

Her rage simmers away as she meets her family, studying the hungry faces of her mother and father, her brothers, the child she used to be. It propels her to fight off would-be thieves trying to take her family’s rations. Kira may be imagining it, but she thinks the hands of the Prophets are guiding her, giving her the chance to protect her family in this one small way. She sought out this experience to learn what happened between her mother and Dukat, but in taking her back here, maybe the Prophets have given her something more.

But she cannot protect them from what comes next: she and her mother dragged away to Terok Nor for the pleasure of Cardassian officers. Kira stands with the other stolen Bajoran women in the cold hull of a transport ship, their bodies herded between crates of medical supplies and industrial machinery, and it is only the white-hot flame of her rage that stops her from being sick at this first clue into Dukat’s story about Meru.

Kira has to get her mother out of here. She positions herself beside Meru when they are being assigned quarters, and the two of them are placed together. But when Kira suggests finding a way to escape, Meru seems skeptical, or maybe just scared, more interested in the katterpod beans and hasperat and moba fruit laid out before them than she is in coming up with a plan.

Kira knows it is unfair of her, the twinge of judgement she feels at her mother’s excitement over the food, or at her mother’s hesitance to find a way off the station. Her mother has reason to be afraid; she has a scar on her cheek to remind her of what happens when she fails to show deference to Cardassians. Fine. But Kira will not just sit back and allow Dukat to take her mother against her will, not if she can help it. Her mother must have done something, fought back somehow, when this all happened before.

Kira’s father always said Meru was the bravest woman he knew, after all.

* * *

The next morning, all the women are given new clothing: gaudy jewel-toned gowns with low necklines, embroidered slippers, sheer lace panties that rub uncomfortably against Kira’s skin. They are taken to a meeting room for inspection, trinkets at a market.

The Bajoran man who selected them all back in the refugee centre introduces himself as Basso, and launches into a long speech, threatening their families if they step out of line. Typical collaborator, happy to cozy up with the Cardassians in exchange for a chance at these petty little power trips. If she were still in the Resistance, his would be a life she would lose no sleep over ending.

Kira is deep in this train of thought when Basso is cut off by the very last person she wants to see, the man she knew, despite her hope to the contrary, that she _would_ see: Gul Dukat.

Kira tenses without thinking, anticipating the moment when Dukat will turn his gaze on her, greet her with all his usual good humour, undress her with his eyes as he does whenever they meet. But this Dukat does not know her. This Dukat is younger. He and Kira have not yet crossed paths.

Still, Kira’s heart beats faster as he approaches.

But it is not Kira who catches Dukat’s eye.

Meru asks about the safety of their families, and just like that, Dukat takes an interest in her, removing her scar with a dermal regenerator, his touch gentle, his eyes full of compassion. It takes every fibre of self-control in Kira’s being not to pull him off her mother right then and there.

But what worries her most is the look on her mother’s face afterwards: wonder, and possibly something like gratitude.

* * *

Kira knew this happened during the Occupation. She heard the stories and read the reports: Bajorans, mostly (but not exclusively) women, plucked from their lives and forced into sexual slavery for Cardassian officers, their existence couched in euphemism and denial. But it was just one horror among many, and one she never felt any particular connection to. Abstract.

Now it is becoming all too real.

Back in their quarters, Kira re-does Meru’s hair, showing off more of her face now that her cheek no longer bears a scar. The two of them down glasses of kanar for courage. Kira sublimates her rising panic in that still-simmering rage, squeezing her mother’s hand as they are led from their quarters to a room full of guls and legates and other assorted Cardassian brass, all men, breath hot and smiles cold.

Kira stands with her mother in a corner of the room. She holds a bottle of kanar, ready for serving, her fingers itching to smash it across the nearest Cardassian’s skull.

A middle-aged legate with a lopsided smile and kanar already on his breath grabs Kira, maneuvering her onto his lap, cold fingers digging into her waist. Kira loses sight of her mother for a while after that. Her legate wants to hear all about her hatred of Cardassians, treating her rage as a flavour of flirtation, and as much as it grates at her, she has to admit it’s easier to trade verbal barbs than it would be to simply smile and look pretty and let his hands wander as they pleased. Plus, he’s drunk, and getting more so, which should make it possible to fend him off at the end of the night.

The next time she catches sight of her mother, it is because of a commotion—Dukat, pulling her mother from the grip of a gul who has her pressed against a wall. Kira frowns—why does Dukat care?—but her legate just laughs. It’s a scene he’s watched play out before—Dukat swooping in to perform just such a dubious rescue. He even predicts the line Dukat will use on Meru, the way he will order her removed from the room.

Sure enough, Dukat holds Meru’s gaze and tells her, with ostensible sincerity, “I only hope you won't condemn us all for the boorish behavior of one man.”

Oh, Kira doesn’t like this at all.

As the night wears on, the crowd in the room thins out, officers dragging Bajoran women away. Kira plies her legate with more kanar, nodding as he asks her if she hates him for the way he’s got his hand on her thigh.

What has happened to her mother? What has Dukat done with her?

There are only four people in the room now: Kira and her legate, another Cardassian, and a Bajoran woman sprawled across his lap. The other Cardassian grabs the woman by the hair and pushes her to her knees right there in front of them, laughing. Kira’s legate observes the scene with glassy eyes.

“OK,” says Kira, standing up and taking the legate’s clammy hand in her own. Behind her is the sound of a buckle being undone, and Kira knows that if she does not leave right this minute she will run at that man and crush his windpipe with her fist. “Let’s get you home.”

* * *

It’s easy enough to convince the legate to part ways with her once they leave the party—he’s so out of it she thinks she could convince him to lie down right there in the hallway. She makes it back to her own quarters alone, itching for a shower.

There is a sound from the bedroom, and Kira calls out to her mother—but it is not Meru who emerges, but Basso. He says her mother is now staying with Dukat, and refuses to let her see her, and just like that, all of Kira’s tight-packed rage from the evening boils over and she lunges for him, fighting off the guard who jumps to his defense.

But there are more guards, and the butt of one of their disruptors doubles her over. There is another blow—this one to her head—and then another. She is pulled to her feet, dizzy. Basso says something about her being unfit, or maybe ungrateful, but her ears are ringing too loudly for her to tell for sure.

Rough hands, her feet unsteady underneath her, hallways and turbolifts, dimness and lights.

Dukat could be doing anything to her mother right now, and Kira has no way to reach her.

Why did she come here? Why did she seek out this orb experience? Why did she think it would be a good idea to relive the Occupation just because Dukat got under her skin?

The guards unlock the fence to the Bajoran section of the Promenade and toss her inside. She lands on her hands and knees, every part of her aching, her heart most of all. The fence slides shut with a clang.

At least she’ll never have to feel that legate’s hands on her again.

* * *

The next morning, Kira is roused from her uneasy slumber and pushed into a line of bleary-eyed workers headed for the ore processing centre.

This is not Kira’s first experience in ore processing.

The last time she was here was about fifteen years after when she is right now, when she came here on a mission for the Resistance, and at that point the facility was fully operational. Grime had seeped into every nook and cranny of the refinery rooms and the storage areas and even the docking bays. Uridium dust hung in the sweltering air, coating her hair and the ridges of her nose, sending her into fits of hacking coughs.

It’s different now—not quite set up yet. The machines are new and shiny, the air slightly clearer. But for all that, Kira still finds herself exhausted two hours in to her first thirteen-hour shift, muscles aching, face dripping with sweat.

It doesn’t help that her stomach is in knots, thinking of what Dukat might be doing to her mother. She thinks of how this all started, his transmission to her in the middle of the night, his gloating smile as he told her that he and her mother were lovers. Lovers. Kira feels sick, but it could just be heat exhaustion setting in.

A Bajoran man comes up to her, pulling her from her thoughts. “We’re setting the pace for this place for years to come,” he says in a low voice, mouth so close to Kira’s ear she feels his lips brush her earring. “Don’t make it easy for them to work us to death, yeah?”

Kira nods, slowing the speed at which she shovels ore onto the conveyor belt, her heart leaping at this small moment of rebellion.

Her people have always fought back. Her mother is probably fighting back right now, in whatever way she can.

* * *

It doesn’t take long to find a contact for the budding Terok Nor resistance cell. Kira knows how to look for these things. She makes the right overtures, and soon she is sharing dinner with a slight man with piercing eyes, telling him about Meru and how much she wants to know if she is alright.

He seems excited when she explains her story, and Kira soon learns why—she’s seen the Cardassian side of the station, seen rooms and corridors most Bajorans are barred from accessing. It’s vital information for the Resistance, information she could trade. But something tells her to hold back—gut instinct, or perhaps the hands of the Prophets. She needs to keep her head down.

The man nevertheless promises to keep an ear out for any news of Meru, and Kira waits, the hours bleeding into each other, dread dripping like sweat down her back as her ore processing shifts consume her days, rage and hunger warring inside her as she tries to sleep in the workers’ dormitory each night.

How will this orb experience end? Already it has gone on for longer than she expected. There must be something about to happen, something to do with her mother, with Dukat, with Kira’s reason for being here.

So Kira waits.

And two weeks later, her mother calls for her.

* * *

But their reunion is not what Kira expected.

Dukat has not hurt Meru, oh no—there has been no need for that. Dukat has courted her, brought her flowers, taken her on a trip to Bajor, and now Meru smiles when she talks about him, a strange and faraway smile. She says it’s complicated. She says she’s doing it for her family. She says he’s not who Kira thinks he is.

Kira can’t believe it.

Somehow, in the two weeks that Kira has been stuck in the ore processing centre, her mother has fallen in love with Gul Dukat.

Planting a bomb is the only thing Kira can do.

She will kill Dukat. She will leave her mother’s fate up to the Prophets, but if the blast catches her as well, it will be nothing Meru does not deserve.

So Kira offers to help the Terok Nor resistance cell with its first large-scale mission. She visits her mother again. She drops an explosive earring into a lush plant in Dukat’s quarters. As Kira turns to leave, her mother plugs an isolinear rod Dukat just gave her into a console, but Kira walks away before she sees what it contains. Nothing about Meru interests her anymore.

Rage buoys Kira out of the blast radius, but the explosion is still so loud her ears ring, and then there is running, people pushing past her, the medical team speaking into their comm badges, _priority report, four casualties, yes, the Prefect_ , and then—

Kira takes another step, and finds herself back in the refugee centre. Children with distended bellies playing in the dirt. Pea soup and urine and cave dampness and sweat.

 _Prophets guide me_ , she thinks, as everything begins to unfold all over again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Two**

Kira recalls the words of the vedek who prepared her for her orb experience.

“Once you open yourself to the Orb of Time, it is up to the Prophets when you will return to the here and now,” the vedek said. “Do you understand? You have asked the Prophets a question, and they will answer, but not always in the way you might expect. They do not share our limited understanding of time.”

At the time, Kira found her tone condescending—did this vedek think Kira did not keep the faith, did not know what to expect from an orb experience?

“I can handle it,” Kira had said, her hands itching to open the jeweled casing containing the orb. All around her were soft sounds of prayer from elsewhere in the temple, warmth, the smell of incense.

Kira blinks, but the world in front of her remains the same: the rock walls and hanging blankets and damp chill of the refugee centre.

There must be a lesson here. But Kira is not sure she wants any more lessons. She has her answer now, doesn’t she? She knows what Meru was to Dukat, and she knows what she was to Kira, to all of Bajor: a collaborator. What more could she get out of this by reliving it once more?

Perhaps she interfered too much last time. That must be it; she recalls Sisko’s exhortation to avoid changing the past. The Prophets must mean for her to be more of an observer.

The idea of being any more passive than she was before is chafing, but Kira resolves to do her best.

* * *

This time, Kira does not challenge the men who come to take her family’s rations. Instead, she watches as they grab the bowls from her mother’s hands and walk away, leaving a night of hunger in their wake. Little Nerys begins to cry, and Kira takes a meditative breath and forces herself to do nothing.

She does not speak with Meru, or walk with her, and when they are brought to Terok Nor, she and Meru are assigned to different quarters.

Kira is placed with a woman who introduces herself as Ko Seta. Seta shoves handfuls of katterpod beans into her mouth and asks if Kira has ever fucked a Cardassian before. Kira shakes her head. She thinks of her mother, in the quarters across the hall, no doubt closing her eyes in bliss as each bite of hasperat sears her tongue. Her mother, who is about to become a traitor.

“I have. Too many times. But I’m still here,” says Seta, and Kira realizes a beat too late that Seta means for this to be comforting.

Kira excuses herself. She lays on her new bed, a large mattress in a small windowless room.

It takes her a long time to fall asleep.

* * *

The next time Kira sees her mother is the following day, during their inspection. She watches as Dukat takes the same interest in Meru that he did the first time, his soft touches, the dermal regenerator held gently against the scar on her cheek, Meru’s cautious smile.

Not having forged any kind of friendship with Meru, Kira finds herself standing alone at the party, more on edge than she was during the first time loop, without her mother’s presence to ground her. But she does not remain there for long. The gul who took an interest in Meru during that first loop gets to Kira before anyone else can, and before she can pacify him with some overly-generous servings of kanar, he has her pressed against a wall, his breath hot and heavy against her neck.

When Kira was in the Resistance, her cell occasionally ran missions that necessitated some element of seduction, either for intelligence gathering or for distraction. Kira was given this role exactly once: at age seventeen, she was tasked with distracting a Cardassian mining engineer while her comrades copied his schematics for a new open-pit mine and adjoining workers’ barracks.

She got as far as soliciting him on the street and following him back to his apartment, but no further: as soon as he tried to push her to her knees in his hallway she panicked and headbutted him into a glass display case, knocking him out and jeopardizing the entire mission. _What would you have done if he’d managed to get his dick in your mouth?_ Lupaza asked afterwards, barely concealing her laughter, and Kira answered without hesitation that she would have bitten it off, and that was the end of her career as a honeypot.

Kira thinks of that Cardassian now, and she thinks about the one now pressed against her, his sharp-edged armour and his growing arousal poking into her flesh. Surely, even if the Prophets mean for her to avoid interfering in the time stream, they cannot expect her to lay back and let this man fuck her? But Kira schools herself to passivity. She must act carefully; she cannot risk having to repeat these events once more. And as long as she is in this room, surrounded by Cardassian officers and guards, there’s only so much she can do anyway.

Kira is still considering how best to go about getting herself away from him when a commotion on the other side of the room makes both her and the gul turn their heads. It’s a near-identical scene to what happened during the first time loop. Dukat pulls Meru from the grip of a legate, looking directly into her eyes as he makes sure she is alright.

“I only hope you won't condemn us all for the boorish behavior of one man,” says Dukat, and sure enough, Meru smiles at him.

Wild laughter threatens to bubble up within Kira as Dukat orders Meru to be removed from the room. She is lightheaded, dizzy. The gul who is her problem for the evening has his hands on her breasts, squeezing hard enough to bruise, and she cannot quite remember how they got there.

Kira thinks of the lilacs back in her room on DS9, the ones she bought in her mother’s honour after going to the temple on the Promenade to light a candle of remembrance.

The gul begins bunching up the fabric of her skirt in his hands, pulling it up until his palm is on her bare thigh.

Kira focuses on the unwanted sensation, forcing it to bring her back to her body. She has to get out of here.

But Kira forces herself to hold off on any attack. She breathes, slow and steady, enduring. And just when she cannot take it anymore, just as cold Cardassian fingers begin tracing the edge of her underwear, the world around her begins to fade.

For a moment, Kira feels victorious, anticipating the glow of the Orb and the warmth of the temple. But then she looks around, and sees that she is standing in the refugee centre once more, right back to where she started.

**Three**

Kira clenches her fists and wills herself not to scream.

If the Prophets do not want her to avoid interfering in the time stream, what do they want her to do? What more is there? Why would they force her to experience these events once again?

She stands in the middle of this section of cave for a long moment, getting her breathing under control, trying not to cry. There are people all around, but no one offers her help; everyone here is too preoccupied with their own quiet tragedies to pay attention to a stranger’s.

Despite the squalor and hunger and despair of the refugee centre, Kira remembers moments of joy as well: lessons from the vedeks on faith and hope and love, games of springball with her brothers, cups of warm tea on cold winter nights. People here did help each other, she knows they did, looking after each other’s children, telling jokes, covering for each other when the guards came searching for contraband.

But no one can help her now.

Maybe Kira is meant to stop her mother from being taken to Terok Nor in the first place. After all, her mother might never have become a collaborator if she had not been placed in that situation. Perhaps the Prophets are giving her a gift: a chance to correct this one thing, regain this one piece of her life that the Cardassians took from her.

That must be it. That must be what she has to do to be released from this time loop and returned to the present day.

* * *

This time, when the men try to take her family’s food, Kira fights back even harder than she did the last time, stripping them of both their weapons before chasing them off. Neither of them were carrying disruptors, but she’s now in possession of two crude knives, and she knows how to make them count.

When Basso and the Cardassian guards come to select women to take to the station, Kira throws the first knife at Basso, embedding the blade in his chest. He falls to the ground, spluttering, blood pooling out of the corners of his mouth.

Just as Kira suspected, she feels no particular guilt when she sees his body still.

In the confusion, Kira manages to jump on the back of one of the Cardassians, but he knocks the remaining knife from her hand. She retaliates by pressing her thumbs into his eyes until she feels them give way. He screams, and thrashes, tossing both her and his disruptor to the ground.

Bingo. Kira reaches out to grab the disruptor, her blood singing with the chance to finally act.

Before she can grasp it, however, a boot stamps down on her hand. The other Cardassian.

Kira jerks up, slamming her free elbow into his crotch even as she feels something crack in one of her pinned fingers.

The Cardassian stumbles back, and Kira pulls her hand out from under his boot. Something is broken, but she can think about that later. She activates the disruptor, and shoots the other Cardassian, who is still clutching his hands over bleeding eyes. She aims at the one who stepped on her hand—and pain explodes through her chest.

Kira looks down at herself, sees the hole, the blood. She knows, from years of observational experience, that this is not a good wound. Still, she raises her disruptor. Maybe she can still—

Another hit. This one to the head. Kira slumps forward. Her forehead hits the dirt.

She’s been too reckless, gone too far. After all these years, all those fights, is this really the way she’s going to go? Here in the past, far away from the life she’s built for herself, fighting over a tragedy that has already taken place?

At least it will be quick.

The last thing she sees is a Cardassian boot rearing back and slamming into her face.

After that, everything goes dark.


	3. Chapter 3

**Four to Ten**

The next thing Kira knows, she is on her feet, her hand unbroken, her wounds gone just as surely as her assailants are. Around her are familiar fabrics hanging from familiar sections of rock. She is back to where she started once more.

The adrenaline from the fight is gone from her body too, but the absence of it feels more like a crash than a return to any kind of equilibrium. It’s good to know that death will simply start the time loop over again, but she doesn’t relish having found out like that.

But she got so close to subduing the guards. And now she knows their moves, their strategies, their position as they enter this section of the caves. She can try again.

So Kira does. Once more, twice more, over and over.

On her seventh try, she succeeds, taking all three of them down with only minor damage to herself.

She turns, panting, to meet the gaze of her family: Meru and Taban staring in terror, holding Reon and Pohl to them, shielding their eyes; little Nerys simply watching her in steady concentration.

“You have to get out of here,” says Kira, looking not just at her own family but everyone else in the area, some of whom are also staring, some of whom are studiously pretending not to see the carnage around them.

This is when more guards storm into the space. They force Kira to her knees, and then they carry out the same orders as before: pick out good-looking Bajoran women, round them up, haul them away. Once again, Meru is chosen.

And as Meru bids her family a tearful goodbye, Kira is forced to her knees and executed right there on the hard-packed dirt.

**Eleven to Eighteen**

Maybe Kira needs to intervene earlier, before Basso and the guards come looking for women to steal.

She tries this in the next seven loops: rushing to her family, telling them to leave. But it always takes too long to explain, and no matter what she says, her family remains suspicious of her—what if Kira is trying to take their things, or their spot in the caves, or entrap them somehow?—and before she knows it, the thieves attack, and then Basso and the guards are there, and Kira is right back to where she started.

**Nineteen**

Maybe the problem is that if Meru is to be truly redeemed, she must be given a choice, and make the right one.

The first loop, her mother did not seem enthusiastic when Kira suggested they plan an escape, but Kira also did not push the issue, or offer any kind of clear plan. Perhaps her mother just needs a bit more persuasion. Perhaps she needs to feel escape is more possible.

Kira can do that.

So the next time loop, Kira befriends Meru just as she did before, doing her best to put aside the still-burning flame of her anger. When they are taken to their shared quarters, she grips both her mother’s hands in her own and says, “I can get us out of here.”

“What do you mean?” says Meru, disentangling her hands from Kira’s to take a bite of hasperat. She closes her eyes and just stays like that for a moment, chewing. It reminds Kira of when she was first appointed to DS9 and realized she could have nearly any food she wanted from the replicator, the way she ordered a breakfast porridge and realized halfway through eating it that she had started crying.

“I’m in the Resistance,” lies Kira. “I can help you get out. Off Terok Nor, back to Bajor.” She knows the station like the back of her hand, more than anyone here could possibly expect. There are places the two of them can hide, ways to stow onto a Cardassian freighter and slip out at the end of the journey.

It won’t be easy, but maybe it’s best if her mother thinks it will. Maybe then she’ll agree to make the attempt.

Meru’s eyes dart from side to side. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“You heard them—if we cooperate, our families get extra rations. If we don’t, who knows what they’ll do to them.” Meru brings a piece of moba to her mouth, smiling faintly as it touches her tongue.

Kira revises her plan. “So we get word to your family first, get them out of Singha, give them new identity chips.”

It won’t be too difficult to make contact with the Terok Nor resistance cell, especially since she already knows the identity of one of its members. She’ll just have to get herself sent to ore processing again. She has enough useful skills that she can make herself invaluable to the cell fairly quickly, and then she can bargain for her family’s freedom. All while hoping a solid escape plan is enough to insulate Meru from Dukat’s charms.

This is getting complicated. But Kira can make it work.

She has to.

But Meru frowns. “And my children would spend the rest of their lives in hiding? And that’s assuming nothing went wrong. If any of us were caught—” Meru shakes her head.

Kira meets her mother’s gaze across the table. “I promise, I know what I’m doing.”

“What about your own family?”

Kira thinks quickly. “I don’t have any family left. I guess—I just want to help you.”

“Well, thank you,” says Meru. She picks up a piece of veklava, then holds the plate out to Kira, who declines with a shake of her head. “I mean that. But I can’t afford to be reckless.”

Kira wants to scream. “What you can’t afford to be is complacent. I need to get you out of here before it’s too late.”

Meru shakes her head. “If I cooperate, the Cardassians said they'd take care of my family. I have to at least consider that. You saw the way they gave them bags of food, back at the refugee centre.”

Kira laughs bitterly before she can stop herself. “They didn’t give them much, trust me.” Kira knows exactly what those bags contain: assorted grains. Expired Cardassian field rations. Dried beans, sometimes, or cava root, or salt. Very occasionally some cough medicine or bandages. Not exactly a feast.

But not exactly nothing, either. Kira can remember when a new bag would arrive, the way her father would lay everything out, catalogue it carefully. Full-belly nights. Survivor’s compensation, he said, for her mother’s death, and Kira had never questioned that until now.

Did the other adults around them know the real reason for the packages? Was that why they always refused when her father offered to share?

Was her father ever ashamed?

Kira grits her teeth. She’ll change all of this. She’ll make her mother fix it with her.

“Listen to me,” she says. “You need to get out of here. As soon as you can. And I’m telling you, I can help.”

Meru picks up another piece of moba. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes! Meru, think of the kind of life you’ll have here. Don’t you want more?”

Meru laughs, a hollow sound. “You act like it’s so easy.”

“It’s easier than this!” Dimly, Kira is aware she is yelling. “You’ll be able to sleep at night, because you won’t be a collaborator!”

“A _collaborator_? What do you think is happening here? Do you think I signed up for this? Did you?”

Kira wants to grab her mother and shake her. “You might think that now, but with time, everything else will fade, and you’ll forget how important it is to hate them. You’ll just think of the food, and the sonic showers, and you’ll learn to like it, and I can’t let that happen to you.”

“I knew it!” says Meru. “You think you’re better than me! Why? Because you can sit here with a table of food in front of you and barely eat? Because you’re not the least bit excited at the idea of a hot shower?”

“That’s not—” tries Kira.

Meru cuts her off. “You’re sitting here judging me. Acting like I’ve got a choice.”

“You do have a choice!”

“No, I don’t. Not a real one. What you’re describing, running, hiding—my children deserve more than that. This way we’ll all be taken care of, at least a little bit. And if this is my life now, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself when I can?”

Kira cannot do this. She gets up, pushing her chair back so hard it tips over, and storms into her bedroom—

and finds herself standing once more on the dirt floor of the refugee centre.

**Twenty**

Kira can admit it—she did not handle that conversation well. No matter how justified she feels in her anger, an argument like that is no way to convince someone of anything.

She should be friendlier with her mother at first, enough that Meru will keep Kira by her side, listen to what she has to say.

And once she’s convinced Meru, she can only hope that the Prophets will be satisfied and willing to send her back to her own time.

So this time, Kira befriends her mother again, but offers no harsh judgment or ultimatums on their first night together. She knows what will happen if she lets the time loop play out just as it did the first time: her mother will request that Kira join her as her companion once she has settled in to her life with Dukat. And then Kira will be able to convince her to make her escape.

So Kira lets it all happen again, watching as Dukat takes an interest in her mother, brushing off the advances of the drunken legate the night of the party, attacking the guards in her quarters and being sent to ore processing.

But unlike the first time, Kira knows what will happen now. She wastes no time making contact with the resistance cell on the station, and once she does, she does not bother asking after Meru’s wellbeing. Instead, she asks about the rest of her family, her father and brothers and her little child self, and what it would take to get them out of the refugee centre and into hiding.

It will take a lot. But Kira has a lot to offer in return. She makes some suggestions on rigging explosives with raw uridium. She draws them the map they want, making it just detailed enough to be helpful without revealing just how intimately she knows this station. She shares her knowledge of Cardassian security protocols and how to override them, sticking to the ones she knows would have been in effect when she was a small child.

By the time Meru calls for her, Kira is a probationary member of the Terok Nor resistance cell. She can offer her mother a concrete plan of escape for herself and her family. She knows the goings-on of the station and of Bajor, the escalating tensions of the Occupation. And two weeks worth of thirteen-hour shifts in ore processing have cooled her rage slightly, if only because it has been cut through with exhaustion.

Kira follows Basso as he leads her through the hallways of Terok Nor on the way to see her mother, keeping her head down and her footsteps unsteady to hide her confidence. She can do this. She knows she can.

* * *

Kira spends the afternoon playing kotra and drinking deka tea with her mother. She says nothing when her mother insists that Dukat has been treating her well, or even when Meru tells Kira how he is trying to do good for Bajor. Over and over, Kira bites her tongue, doing her best to build up a rapport with Meru, or at the very least to not scream at her for betraying everything Kira has believed in her entire life.

If Kira thought an afternoon with Meru was difficult, dinner with Meru and Dukat is an even greater challenge.

“Rekantha Province is gorgeous this time of year,” says Dukat when they have all sat down around the lavish table in his quarters.

“It is,” says Meru, taking a sip of springwine. “You should come with us next time—she can come along, can’t she?”

Dukat smiles indulgently at Meru from across the table. “Of course, my love.” He turns to Kira. “Have you ever been to Rekantha Province? I couldn’t believe that Meru hadn’t. I think it’s one of the most breathtaking parts of Bajor.”

“There aren’t a lot of opportunities to take a vacation when you live in a refugee camp,” says Kira before she can stop herself.

But Dukat just nods. “How unfortunate. You _must_ accompany us next time.” Looking at Kira’s untouched plate, he frowns. “Please, eat. I’m sure you’re starving.”

Kira grits her teeth and forces herself to breathe through the swelling of her rage. How can her mother even tolerate this man, much less seem to genuinely care for him? How can she wake up beside him day after day and feel anything but loathing?

Back in Kira’s own time, Dukat must look at her sometimes and think of Meru. When he flirts with Kira, sometimes he is thinking of her mother. He’s probably compared their features in his mind, their lips, their breasts, their noses.

Kira forces herself to take a bite of hasperat.

“We thought you would enjoy some Bajoran food tonight,” says Meru.

“I must say, I’ve grown quite fond of your cuisine in my time here,” says Dukat, dabbing at his chin with a napkin. “Meru tells me she’s impressed at how spicy I like my hasperat.”

“The other officers can’t believe it,” says Meru, smiling.

“I tell them, this is just like what I’ve been saying to Central Command,” says Dukat. “Bajor has so much to offer beyond her natural resources. Dismissing the culture has been a mistake—we have much we could learn from each other, Bajor and Cardassia, if either of us were willing to listen.”

Kira downs her entire glass of springwine in one gulp, and pours herself another.

She takes her leave as soon as the meal is over.

After two weeks in the ore workers’ dormitory, the silence of Kira’s new quarters is unsettling. Before she goes to sleep, Kira offers a prayer to the Prophets: that she is on the path they have set for her, that they will give her a sign if she is not, that she may walk in their light. It is the kind of prayer she used to offer them the night before a mission back when she was in the Resistance. It is the prayer of someone walking a rope bridge over a treacherous canyon, and it is as familiar to Kira as breathing.

For a moment, before she falls asleep, Kira forgets that she has ever known Bajor after the Occupation.

* * *

So Kira is now Meru’s companion.

Mostly, her role consists of keeping Meru company whenever Dukat is occupied with the business of running the station. Rarely do they leave their quarters. They play board games, Cardassian and Bajoran alike, for hours. Sometimes, Meru paints, but she never lets Kira see her canvases. Always, Meru surrounds herself with food and drink, ordering new dishes every time their plates are empty, bowls of alvas and sweet Cardassian pastries, springwine and kanar.

In between games and bites of fruit, Kira begins relaying key news to Meru, gleaned from their time apart. The ore processing centre is close to being fully operational, and already workers have begun collapsing from the heat. One of the Orbs of the Prophets has been taken to a museum on Cardassia Prime, and a vedek in Dakhur lit himself on fire in protest. The Great Forest of the Eastern Province has been entirely clear-cut, stumps as far as the eye can see.

“And remember, Meru,” says Kira on the third day, grasping her mother’s hands in her own and looking into her eyes, “Dukat has a hand in all of this. I don’t care what he tells you. He’s implicated.”

And perhaps it is Kira’s soft manner, the way she manages to remain improbably cordial with Dukat, or perhaps it is the food and the drink and the games and the laughter, but Meru does not yell at her the way she did when Kira tried to convince her last time. She listens and her eyes grow wet with tears, and Kira holds her as she cries, feeling a perverse hope springing in her chest that her mother has finally seen the light.

But as Kira sits with her every day, telling her of fresh horrors, Meru begins to grow quieter and quieter. She eats less of the food and drinks more of the kanar. She stops laughing. On the seventh day, she refuses to get out of bed until Kira physically pulls her out and pushes her into the sonic shower. On the eighth day, Kira hears Meru and Dukat arguing, and when she comes over that afternoon, Meru’s eyes are red and there are fresh lilacs on the table.

On the ninth day, Basso comes into her quarters in the early evening, flanked by two Cardassian guards. He tells her that her services as Meru’s companion are no longer required, and that he is here to bring her back to ore processing.

“Why?” says Kira, her heart sinking.

“It seems you do not bring out the best in Meru,” says Basso, grinning his awful little grin.

“Is that what Dukat thinks?” says Kira.

Basso shoots her an amused look. “As far as you’re concerned, it’s what they both think. Night shift is about to start, let’s get going.” He eyes Kira’s outfit, an embroidered gown Dukat gave her when she started as Meru’s companion. “A pity you won’t have time to change. I’m sure your friends down in ore processing will be very interested to hear you got that dress from the Prefect of Bajor.”

“I want to speak to Meru,” says Kira.

Basso ignores her. He nods to the guards, who move towards Kira and grip her arms. They force her out the door and into the hallway.

Kira kicks and twists as she is dragged down the hall. “Meru!” she screams.

The door to Dukat’s quarters slide open, and there is her mother, standing in the doorway.

Kira meets her gaze. “Meru, listen to me. Dukat doesn’t want me around because I’m telling you things he doesn’t want you to hear. Look what he’s doing to me!”

But Meru does not seem shocked, or angry, or even scared. She just seems sad. She shakes her head at Kira, her loose hair falling over her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and closes the door, and the world around Kira begins to fade.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content note: out of all the chapters of this fic, this one contains the most intense/explicit depiction and discussion of sexual violence. Please take care of yourselves and heed those archive warnings. And hey—thanks everyone for making it this far. We’re halfway there!

**Twenty-One**

Maybe the trick is for Kira to get to her mother a bit earlier in the loop. Maybe if she starts whispering in her mother’s ear before the whole thing seems too complicated to disentangle herself from, her mother will be willing to try to leave Dukat.

At one point when Kira was Meru’s companion, Meru mentioned that she would have called for her sooner if Kira had not been banished to ore processing, that it would have taken Dukat less time to agree to the idea if Kira was still in Cardassia’s good graces.

Kira knows only too well what those “good graces” consist of. Bile rises in her throat.

But this could be her way out. She got so close last time.

So Kira befriends Meru once again. Their first night on Terok Nor, she holds Meru as she cries, and tries to tamp down her anger at the path she knows her mother is about to go down. Kira can change it. She must change it. And then she can go back to the present day and look at the lilacs on her dresser without wanting to smash the vase against the wall.

* * *

The next day, it all plays out once more: Dukat’s interest in Meru during the inspection, his manufactured gallantry at the party. Kira finds herself back with the talkative, heavy-drinking legate from the first time loop, trading verbal barbs and keeping his kanar glass full as the party becomes rougher and wilder around them.

“I bet you think we’re all disgusting, making you girls entertain us like this,” says the legate, his thumb rubbing circles on Kira’s thigh. His words have begun to slur together, his speech becoming even more sibilant than before.

Kira takes an almost-nonexistent sip of kanar, and then tops up his glass and pretends to top up her own. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

He squeezes her thigh, his hand moving upwards. She knocks it away and he laughs.

“I like you! You better not go losing this spirit of yours once you’re here for a while.”

“Don’t worry, I could never stop hating you,” says Kira. Their conversation is playing out virtually identically to the one from the first time loop, but the compounded effects of reliving all this gives it a more sinister tone than before: while the first time she’d thought of this legate as pathetic more than anything, now his power over her feels more total.

Still, she got through an evening with him before, and fended him off at the end of the night, and sure enough, she is able to do so again—get him sufficiently drunk that she can convince him to part ways with her in the hall.

Knowing that the guards she attacked during the other time loops are in her quarters clearing out Meru’s things, she waits for them to leave, slipping into a blind spot between two bulkheads in the deserted corridor. Only once they have cleared out does she go back to her empty quarters and curl up in bed.

If someone asked Kira before this orb experience what she remembered from the Occupation, she would have said she remembered everything. It is only now that she is back in its darkness that she realizes just how much she forgot. The constant anger flowing through her like a current, making her want to lash out at every Cardassian she sees—that she remembers. But the effort it takes to hold back, the crushing weight of others’ power ready to smother her at a moment’s notice, the struggle to hold tight to her dignity while it is being relentlessly ripped from her grasp—all this is something that had faded in her mind before she embarked on this orb experience.

Most of all, she had forgotten the endlessness of it all. The time loop compounds this, but it harmonizes with what is already present, what Kira knows was present every day of the first twenty-six years of her life. Cardassian rule is an inescapable reality. The future is just more of the same, barely a future at all.

Kira lived through it before. On the good days, she had her faith and her anger and her fierce-burning hope. On the bad days, she had only faith and resignation, a readiness to die for a righteous cause.

Such are her thoughts as she sinks into an uneasy sleep.

* * *

The next morning, Kira awakes to a dry mouth and pounding headache. Prophets, how she hates kanar. She wants a raktajino, but there is no replicator in her quarters, maybe to avoid giving the women easy access to improvised weapons, or to disallow them autonomy over when and what they eat, or perhaps simply because the idea that they would deserve such a thing never crossed anyone’s mind. Wherever the food they’ve been given since their arrival has come from, it is from elsewhere on the station.

But no food or drink is laid out on the table in her quarters the way it has been so far.

Kira pulls on her clothes from the refugee centre, since her choice is between those and her new wardrobe of garish dresses and ill-fitting lingerie. She moves to open the door, and notices a thumbprint lock for the first time. Being able to lock her door is more than she hoped for. But when she tries it, nothing happens—it seems she cannot lock it after all.

No matter. Kira will not be here long—at least, she had better not be. Already she does not want to think about spending any more nights here. Last night was a close call. She can only hope her mother will request her presence soon.

Kira steps out of her room. She hears voices down the hall. Cautiously, she follows the sound. The voices are coming from the same room the party was held in last night. Kira peeks into the room, heart pounding, but all she sees are several of her fellow Bajoran women, sitting around on the same chairs the Cardassian officials sat on the night before, talking and eating.

Kira isn’t sure if she wants to talk to any of them, but she does want food, so she enters.

“Hey,” says one woman. Kira recognizes her as Seta, her roommate from a previous time loop. She sits in a circle with a few others. There are also women sitting alone, scattered throughout the room. Not all the women from the night before are present.

“There’s food over there,” says Seta. “Basso says we can do whatever we want—not that there’s anything to do—as long as we’re back in our rooms by 1900, washed and dressed and everything.”

Kira nods, and goes to the food table. The spread is less lavish than their previous meals, but there is still enough food to feed them all. It’s more than she would be getting in ore processing. Kira pulls a chunk of bread off a cold loaf, fills up a bowl with lukewarm stew, and grabs a moba.

There is, to her dismay, no raktajino.

She means to take the plate back to her quarters, but Seta and the others beckon her over, and so she joins them in their little circle. Better to have friends than enemies in this place.

Seta introduces herself, and the three women sitting with her: Jho, Turi, and Lin. “We’re talking about last night,” she says. “Swapping stories.”

Kira is saved from replying by Jho, who says in a tired voice, “Mine took so long I thought he’d never finish.”

“Did you play with his neck?” says Seta.

Jho shakes her head.

“Do that next time. Like this,” says Seta, and she licks around the peaks and valleys her teeth have left in her piece of moba, circling them with her tongue as though they are Cardassian neck ridges. Her earring bobs with the motion, glinting in the light. Some of the women outside of their little circle lean in to watch. Others, Kira notices, are staring into the middle distance, their plates of food untouched in front of them, seeming utterly oblivious to the entire conversation. One has a chain of fingerprint bruises mottling her neck.

Seta takes a big bite out of the moba and winks, juice dripping down her chin. Some of the women laugh. One stares down at her own piece of fruit, an unreadable expression on her face.

Turi pipes up. “Mine was so drunk I don’t think he cared what I did. I swear it took him ten minutes just to figure out where his cock was supposed to go.”

“I got mine so drunk I convinced him to just go back to his own quarters without me,” says Kira.

She expected more laughter. Instead, Seta says, “So you didn’t let him fuck you? Why?”

“What kind of a question is that?” says Kira sharply.

“But what are you going to do tonight?” says Jho. “What if he remembers how you avoided him?”

“And even if he doesn’t—he’s going to fuck you eventually,” says Lin.

“Or someone else will.”

“Unless you want your family sent to a labour camp.”

“Why not just get it over with?”

“I don’t plan on being here long,” says Kira.

Seta snorts. “You want to be like that woman last night who caught the Prefect’s eye and got whisked away to a life of luxury? Go ahead, dream about it. But in the meantime, you’re stuck right here, opening your legs with the rest of us, Princess.”

Kira stares at her rapidly-congealing stew, hunger and nausea vying for control of her stomach.

* * *

At 1800, the women who have remained in the meeting room head back to their own rooms to prepare for the evening ahead of them. Kira sneaks another moba from the food table on her way out. She takes a sonic shower. She puts on one of her new dresses.

She styles her hair in the same fashion as the night before, feeling the ghost of her mother’s fingers along the back of her neck as she fastens it in place. What is Meru doing now? Sitting down to dinner with Dukat, maybe, listening to him describe his stressful day supervising the destruction of her people. Kira allows the image, and the rage she feels at it, to steady herself. She is doing this all for her mother. She has faced worse than this and survived.

Kira stands by the door, mentally preparing herself for yet another party, another night of feigned smiles and kanar and handsy Cardassians. But when the door opens, it is not Basso come to lead her away, but the legate she brushed off last night, and he is alone.

He steps inside, and the door slides shut.

Kira’s stomach drops.

How naive she was to think there would be another party tonight, hours of forced laughter and flirtation before her real purpose here was expected of her. Now she sees it, the days stretching out before her: Kira in this room, waiting for Cardassian officers to come in and fuck her. Night after night after night.

The legate presses his thumb to the lock beside the door. It works for him as it did not work for Kira, the door sealing itself with a click. It must be set to work with Cardassian prints, giving each of them some privacy while taking a turn with her, but giving her no way to lock anyone out herself.

“You brushed me off last night,” says the legate.

Kira considers him as he steps towards her. She thinks she could take him down, but he is much larger than she is, sturdy enough that she will need to pick the right moment so that she can use his own weight against him. Also, he could be armed, so she’ll need to keep his hands pinned long enough to make a grab for any hidden knives or disruptors—

But Kira stops herself. She’s gotten so far, so close to having her mother’s ear at what might be the crucial moment. She can’t back out now, because she needs to find a way out of the time loop, and she can’t bear the thought of doing all this over again.

Kira isn’t sure what to say, so she tells the truth. He liked that last night, after all. “You’re right, I did.”

Sure enough, the legate just laughs. “Guess you won that round. Let’s see who wins this one, hmm?” He winks. “Feel free to put up a fight.”

Kira’s skin itches. She feels as though some part of her is floating above her head and looking down at the scene, like in campfire stories of people’s paghs leaving their bodies to roam the earth after witnessing a murder. When she breathes, it feels like she is swimming. There is a rushing in her ears.

If this legate wants her to struggle, then Kira resolves not to give him the satisfaction. She stands still as a statue as he walks towards her. But then he grips the back of her neck and pushes her face-first down on the couch, and as she feels his weight settling on top of her, Kira decides she cannot do this.

Fuck the time loop, fuck her plan, fuck it all. She can’t let this happen to her. She can feel the outline of a hard Cardassian cock against the small of her back and Kira knows with bone-deep conviction that she would rather die than have it inside her. She would rather be trapped in this endlessly-looping orb experience forever, never changing her mother’s mind, never returning to DS9, never again setting foot on a free Bajor—anything but this man, his breath on the back of her neck, his hand fisting her hair. His power, his entitlement, his desire.

“Have you ever been with a Cardassian before?” he says.

Kira twists in his grip, ignoring the scream of her scalp as she wrenches her head to one side. She tries to bite at him, but he pushes her face more firmly into the cushions. Her arms are free, though, and she elbows him in the chest, doing her best to throw him off. But now that he is on top of her, his bulk works in his favour, and try as she might, she cannot dislodge him.

The legate laughs. “I’ll take that as a no.”

Fingers on her skirt, pulling, ripping. Fingers fumbling at the fastening of his trousers. Kira straining with all her considerable strength, reaching her hands to gouge and scratch only to feel her arm pulled up behind her back, wrist pressed to shoulder blade, immobilized. The sharp pain of entry, familiar yet alien.

After that, it is all over quickly.

“Now we’re even, hmm?” he says afterwards, doing up his uniform, slicking back his hair with his palm.

“Get out,” says Kira, no longer able to project even a facade of civility.

He laughs indulgently and saunters over to the door, undoing it with a touch of his thumb.

Before he steps into the corridor, he turns. “A word of advice,” he says, as Kira scrambles to a seated position with as much dignity as she can manage. “Me, I like that we can be honest with one another. But some of my colleagues prefer girls with a bit less bite.”

And with that, he turns and walks away, the door sliding shut behind him.

Before she can think better of it, Kira goes to the lock and examines it. She’s seen similar locks before, during her time in the Resistance; she’s more used to forcing them open than shut, but she knows the basics of the mechanism.

And sure enough, in short order she has managed to override the system checks, and the lock clicks into place at the touch of her thumb.

At least no one else will be able to touch her tonight.

She stands in the sonic shower for a long time.

* * *

When Kira enters the common room the next day, Seta and Lin are sitting together at one of the tables, a kotra board spread out between them. They are the only people in the room. Despite Seta’s sharp words to Kira yesterday, she beckons her over with a smile, so Kira follows after filling her plate with today’s food—some kind of fish dish she’s never seen before. It’s probably Cardassian, judging by the liberal drizzle of yamok sauce. It smells awful, but Kira’s stomach is already rumbling, so she resolves to do her best to force it down.

“Where did you find the game?” asks Kira, before they can ask her how her night went.

“Makan gave it to me,” says Lin, and then adds, “he’s one of the Cardassians who saw me last night.”

“One of them gave you a gift?” says Kira, trying to keep the judgment out of her voice. _And you accepted? And you know his name?_

“Don’t get too jealous,” says Lin. “He made me work for it.”

Seta takes a sip of tea. “Think of it as a fee for services rendered.”

“I should get paid just to look at their lumpy faces,” says Lin in a low voice, and she and Seta laugh.

Kira forces down a bite of the fish. These women are not how she expected them to be from the stories and the reports. They are so much more than victims, and yet—doesn’t it show a lack of Bajoran solidarity to cozy up to Cardassians like this? She tries to imagine sitting with her legate from last night, laughing at his jokes, playing with his neck, asking him for a board game or a book or her favourite candy. How can Seta and Lin do it? How can they live with themselves?

“Princess?” says Seta, and Kira realizes she is talking to her—her thoughts have been wandering too long.

“Yeah?”

“I said, how are you holding up?”

“Fine,” Kira snaps. The memory of cold hands is slick like oil on her skin.

One of the other women walks into the common room, her feet bare, her hair disheveled, her gaze far away. She fills a plate with food, then walks back out, ignoring, or perhaps not registering, Seta’s wave in her direction.

“It’s going to get easier,” says Seta.

Lin grimaces. “Prophets, I hope so. I’m just so fucking sore today.”

“How many did you have last night?” says Seta.

“Six.” There is a hitch in Lin’s voice that makes Kira want to burn down all of Cardassia.

“Hey,” says Seta. She looks into Lin’s eyes, taking one of her hands in her own. “Remember what I told you last night?”

Lin swallows. “That we’re all in this together.”

“That’s right.” Seta reaches out and gently grips Lin’s earlobe between thumb and forefinger. “You’re strong. I can feel it. And you’ve got us. Right, Princess?”

“Right,” says Kira dully, her mind racing.

Did Lin have more Cardassians to satisfy last night because Kira locked her door, took herself out of the available pool of women? Is she on the verge of tears now because Kira was selfish enough to think her own comfort mattered more than the others’?

Maybe, says an awful voice in her head, it’s Kira who needs to show some solidarity.

“You,” comes a voice from the doorway, “come with me.”

Kira looks up to see Basso pointing a skinny finger right at her. If she didn’t know the likely reason he was summoning her, she might feel intimidated. As it is, knowing her mother has probably requested her company, all she feels is faint humour at his latest attempt at grabbing onto whatever shreds of power he can.

Kira gets up, nodding at Seta and Lin. Lin looks scared, and Kira realizes she must be scared for her, so she smiles, hoping to put her at ease. What does Lin think is about to happen to her? Does she think Kira is in trouble in some way?

She could be in trouble, Kira realizes with a jolt. Basso could have uncovered her tampering with the thumbprint lock. What will they do to her? Hurt her somehow? Send her to ore processing? She can handle ore processing, but the whole point of her playing nice this time was so that she could reach her mother sooner.

 _Please_ , Kira thinks, less a prayer to the Prophets than a plea to the universe at large. _I can’t do this again._

Basso grips her arm tighter than is strictly necessary, and leads her down the hallway and past a closed door, flashing an access card to let them through. He pushes her into a turbolift, and the two ascend up the levels of the Habitat Ring to where Kira knows Dukat’s quarters are located. She is probably being taken to her mother, just as she thought. Still, she does not breathe calmly until the door slides open and Meru pulls her into an embrace.

“She’ll need new clothes,” says an unmistakable voice. Sure enough, Dukat steps out of the shadows of the room as Meru releases her arms from around Kira. He wrinkles his nose as he takes in Kira, still stubbornly dressed in her begrimed tunic from the refugee centre.

“I’m sure she can wear some of mine,” says Meru. “We’re practically the same size.”

“That’s very kind of you,” says Kira, forcing herself to smile, “but why do I need new clothes?”

Meru’s face breaks out into a smile, and it reminds Kira so much of her brother Reon that Kira almost gasps.

“How would you like to come with us on a trip to Bajor?”

* * *

Dukat takes Meru and Kira to a villa on the edge of the sea in Rekantha Province.

It’s a beautiful spot for a vacation. The villa itself is bright and airy and slightly rustic, with hand-operated doors and a full kitchen. There is a balcony in each bedroom, and an outdoor staircase leading down to a secluded beach.

Kira wonders who used to live here before the Cardassians expropriated it.

The moment they and their bags have been beamed down, Dukat lifts Meru up in his arms and spins her around, cutting off her laughter with a kiss. Kira carries their bags inside, then walks down to the beach. She sits on the sand, closes her eyes, and does her best to meditate, breathing in the salty air, breathing out her knife-sharp terror so it will dissipate on the wind.

Trying to ignore the crawling sensation on her skin, the sense memory of fingers in her hair.

* * *

It is only the following afternoon that Kira is able to catch Meru alone. She joins her out on the beach while Dukat is taking an official call from Central Command. She knows by now not to start with judgement, or with dire news of the Occupation, or with a direct exhortation to escape. Instead, she says, “What do you think your family is doing right now?”

Meru looks out at the blue-green waves. She is wearing a peach-coloured sundress cut in the Cardassian style. It is a minute before she speaks. Finally, she sighs. “I’d like to think they’re playing springball. Taban—my husband—was teaching the children before I left, although they’re still too young to really get it.”

“You’d like to think?” presses Kira.

“Well how should I know what they’re really doing?”

“Maybe they’re waiting in line for food.”

Meru sighs again. “Yes. Maybe. But I might never see them again. So when I picture them, they’re playing together. Laughing. You know?”

Is this what her mother did all the years of Kira’s childhood? Sit on lush beaches imagining that her family was happy, while in reality they shivered and starved? How many times did Kira cry as a young girl while her mother was conjuring up her daughter’s smile to make herself feel better? Is there any limit to Meru’s self-delusion?

But Kira has made it too far in this loop to allow herself to ruin things now. She forces her voice to remain steady as she replies. “Would you like to see them again?”

As she says it, she almost fears the answer.

But Meru nods. “Of course.”

This is it. This is the moment. Kira takes her mother’s hands in her own and looks into her mother’s eyes. “I can get you out of here,” she says. “And I can get your family out too. I can bring you all together again.”

Meru jerks her hands back. Kira expects her to ask her how, or why, to start fretting about the extra rations, to burst into tears. Instead, her mother says, “Don’t do this to me.”

“Do what?”

“Get my hopes up! Stop it. Whatever you’re playing at, I’m not interested.”

“I’m not playing at anything. We’re not that far from Singha—a day’s drive at most. I can get us a vehicle”—she could override the security locks on the one by the villa easily—“and after that, we just drive.” She pauses, but when Meru says nothing, she adds, “Trust me. I’m in the Resistance.”

Meru glares at her. “Please. I don’t want to hear it, OK?”

Kira balls her hands into fists at her side. “What? Why?”

“Yes, my love,” says a voice from behind them. Dukat places a hand on Meru’s shoulder, staring down at her face where she is still sitting. “What don’t you want to hear?”

Meru’s face drains of all colour. Her eyes are wide. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.

“We were talking about our families,” says Kira. The best lie contains a grain of truth. “Wondering what they were doing right now. But I made Meru sad, and I’m sorry for that. I didn’t mean to.”

Dukat turns his stare towards Kira. “Your families are being provided for,” he says. “A token of Cardassia’s gratitude.”

“Yes, of course,” says Kira, forcing herself to smile. “Thank you.”

“Was that all you were talking about?” says Dukat. “I understand you must miss them, but Meru, you look quite scared. Is there something that startled you just now?”

“I—” says Meru.

Dukat brings his thumb to Meru’s chin, raising her head to look even more sharply up at him. “My sweet Meru,” he says. “I thought we were coming to understand one another. Are we already keeping secrets?”

Meru’s eyes dart to one side. Kira sees the hesitance there, the uncertainty.

Is Meru about to choose Dukat over Kira once more, in yet another way?

Kira is not sure she can bear that, not on top of everything else.

She stands. “I tried to get her to escape with me. But she wasn’t interested.”

“Escape?” says Dukat. “From me? But why?”

Kira laughs. Dukat just sounds so genuine, so utterly mystified. “Congratulations, she’s already in so deep she didn’t even want to hear me out. She’s yours, Dukat. You won.” _Just like you do every time._

Kira studiously does not look at her mother. Whatever expression is on Meru’s face right now, Kira is not sure she can bear it.

She knows even before the world begins to fade around her that this whole time loop was a colossal mistake.


	5. Chapter 5

**Twenty-Two**

The squalor of the refugee centre fills Kira’s senses once again. Her heart is pounding in her throat. She tamps down the endless spiral of her horror and tries to think.

The problem is Dukat.

Kira might not understand his appeal in the slightest, but clearly he’s charming, and clearly his charm works on her mother.

If he were simply offering her a warm bed and a full belly and an escape from a life servicing a parade of rough-handed Cardassian officers every night, the whole situation would be simpler, and a bit more understandable. But in every time loop, he offers her mother a piece of his heart, and Meru takes it in her gentle hands and comes to believe it is worth nurturing.

 _This_ is what Kira needs to prevent, because _this_ is what makes her mother a collaborator.

Kira knows what she must do this time. She knows the perfect, awful moment to change the trajectory of the time loop. She will have to catch Dukat’s eye before Meru can. Keep him away from her mother, get him alone—and kill him.

She steels herself. She can do this.

She just can’t let herself think too hard about the first part of that plan.

* * *

Kira makes her move during the inspection.

The room smells like fresh soap and perfume, like bodies scrubbed raw as meat. Kira’s dress is too tight across her chest, and she tries to adjust it to show off as much as she can without seeming too obvious about it. This is just another mission, like countless ones she pulled off during her time in the Resistance.

The moment before Meru usually speaks up, asking Dukat about the fate of their families, Kira asks the question for her. She feels the attention of the room turn towards her. Guards step forward to drag her away, and Dukat holds up his hand to stop them.

Dukat walks up to her. Kira thinks of all the other times she has stood facing him, back on DS9 and in the cockpit of a runabout and trekking across the desert the day they found Ziyal. The way in which, back in her own time, she always meets his gaze with a challenge, insults him, rebuffs his advances. The satisfaction she feels showing him with every word and action that she is his equal and there is nothing he can do about it.

But that is not the case, not here, not now. She is his equal only in the eyes of the Prophets.

And he can do anything he wants.

Dukat reaches out to cup her chin in a gentle hand.

“Your families will be well taken care of,” he says. His thumb traces the skin under Kira’s lip. “That, I promise you.”

Kira schools the defiance from her gaze as best she can. She bites her lip, looking up at him and then looking away. This is the moment, if she were her mother, that Dukat would notice her scar, would erase it with a tender hand and forge the first link in a connection between the two of them. Kira can only hope she has made enough of an impression on him without it.

“Thank you,” she says, hoping the emotion in her voice sounds more like relief than the cocktail of rage and terror it truly is.

Dukat’s face breaks into a wide smile. “It is the least I can do to show my appreciation for your beauty and service.” He steps back, taking in the whole line of women once again. Beside her, Kira sees Meru adjust her hair so it covers more of her cheek. “I have high hopes for you all,” Dukat says, beaming, and with that, he sweeps from the room.

* * *

Back in their quarters Meru frets over her hair more and more, taking it down and then having Kira put it back up again, trying different ways of draping it to hide her scar.

“You’ll be fine,” says Kira. _You don’t know it, but I’m trying to save you._

Meru laughs. “I can’t think of a time when I felt less fine.”

Kira recalls Seta’s words to Lin. “You’ll get through this. You’re strong, I can tell.”

“I don’t know how I’d be doing this without you.” Meru squeezes Kira’s arm. “I’m sorry to be making you listen to all my problems like this.”

Truthfully, though, Kira welcomes the distraction. Being in these rooms reminds her of what happened in them during the last time loop. Memory follows her around their quarters like a ringing in her ears.

It’s funny—she used to think it was some kind of achievement, that she’d made it through the Occupation without being raped.

It used to make her feel proud.

Kira forces herself to sit on the couch where the legate pinned her down, forces herself to lounge, stance wide, taking up space. When she searches herself to see if it makes her feel any better, she finds a kind of void in her chest where her feelings about it should be. All she can muster is a faint relief: she didn’t enjoy herself, didn’t want a single one of his touches, and thus feels no need for shame.

Prophets, she hasn’t felt like this in so long: so deep into survival mode that she can barely process what’s been happening to her. She felt this way when she took part in liberating Gallitep, just weeks of nothing but rage and a growing numbness, her whole life reduced to hollow momentum. She was a stone rolling down a hill, only alive in the sense that she moved.

She’s so much more than that, now. On DS9, she has a whole life. She’s started to learn who else she can be, outside of the righteous fury and the desperate faith, the things that have happened to her and the things that she has done. But here she is, flayed down to the core of herself, right back to where she started.

* * *

At the party, the same legate takes an interest in her, of course, pulling her and her kanar bottle onto his lap. It is so much worse this time, now that her body remembers the feeling of him inside of her. For a moment, Kira contemplates abandoning her whole plan, allowing herself to instead kill this legate, tear him apart for putting his hands on her.

But what good would that do her, or her mother?

Kira tries to hide her discomfort. But then she stops herself—looking uncomfortable gives Dukat the perfect opportunity to swoop in and perform his so-called rescue.

So she lets some of her distress show in her face when the legate grabs her wrist, and does not stop herself from flinching the first time he puts a hand on her thigh. She argues with him less as well, answering his verbal provocations with some approximation of meekness. He clearly doesn’t like it, less interested in her than in past time loops, and she almost wants to laugh.

Behind her, there is a commotion, and Kira fears for a moment that, despite her best efforts, Dukat has taken an interest in her mother after all. But when she turns, there is no Dukat, just Meru and the gul who always presses her against the wall. He is gripping her face, turning her head, his thumb digging roughly into her jaw.

“You were trying to hide this from me, weren’t you?” he says, his voice loud enough that others turn to watch as well. He wrenches Meru’s head to one side, revealing her scar, then pushes her away, the back of her skull hitting the wall with an audible thump.

“I’m sorry, sir,” says Meru, lowering her eyes. Kira thinks of her mother’s story of how she got that scar in the first place: _failed to show a Cardassian soldier the proper respect._

“You thought you could sneak your way in here under false pretenses?”

“No, sir, I—”

The gul digs his fingernails into the line of the scar, pressing her head into the wall. “Shut your ugly face. You should be ashamed of yourself, leeching off our generosity.”

Just then, the door slides open, and in strides Dukat. Kira watches him out of the corner of her eyes as he scans the crowd. Why did he have to enter right now? Dukat will notice Meru’s plight, and he will swoop in just as he does in all the other loops, charming Meru, and then she will be lost.

So Kira does the only thing she can think of. She screams. The sound is sharp even in the cacophony of the room. She follows the scream by jerking back from the legate’s hand on her thigh, scrambling away from his touch.

Sure enough, Dukat walks over to them, Meru forgotten. “Let her go.”

The legate rolls his eyes. Unlike Meru’s tormentor in the other time loops, he seems more amused than anything at the thought of Dukat sweeping his prize for the night out from under him. “Of course, Prefect. By all means, save this helpless young woman from my lecherous hands.”

Dukat ignores him, pulling Kira to her feet. “Are you alright?”

Kira nods, barely having to pretend to look shaken.

Dukat takes her hands in his, looking into her eyes just as he did during the inspection. “I only hope you won't condemn us all for the boorish behavior of one man. Let me personally escort you back to your quarters.”

“But sir—” says the gul who just insulted Meru.

Dukat waves his hand. “I trust you can handle whatever this is without my help, Makan.” He takes Kira’s hand and leads her from the room.

* * *

“I’ve had a thought,” says Dukat, when they are in the hallway. “Why don’t you come back to my quarters for dinner?”

This is exactly what Kira has been trying to achieve. Meru has not caught Dukat’s eye. Now Kira can get him alone and take him out, and Meru will never end up with him, never become a traitor to her people. Dukat will never taint Kira’s memory of her mother now.

But what is going to happen to Meru? Kira has just left her in a room with a man who is hurting her. Whatever happens to her, it’s Kira’s fault for changing the sequence of events.

Nevertheless, she acquiesces. It’s not as though Dukat is expecting to hear anything besides agreement.

“You look tense,” says Dukat as they stand in the turbolift en route to the upper level of the Habitat Ring.

“It’s nothing,” says Kira.

“Are you sure?” Dukat steps behind her and begins massaging her shoulders. Kira flinches at the touch, but forces herself not to pull away. “If there’s anything I can do to make your stay here more comfortable, please let me know.”

“There is one thing,” Kira tries. The turbolift stops, and Dukat leads her down the hallway to his quarters. Kira does her best to pretend she has never seen any of this before.

“Name it,” says Dukat, smiling, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

“I have a friend,” says Kira, “from back in the refugee centre. She’s here right now, back in the room with the others, and I’d just like to know she’s doing alright.” This is what Meru asked of Dukat as well, right? To be able to see Kira? And he granted her wish, didn’t he?

But maybe her mother offered more in return than Kira intends to.

“Of course,” says Dukat. They reach the door to his quarters, and it slides open with a hiss. “Tomorrow, let’s see about arranging a little visit.”

“How about tonight?” says Kira. “I’m sorry, it’s just—” I want to make sure she’s alright before I kill you, because once I do I’m not sure what will happen—“she’s probably worried about me.”

“Perhaps she should have a little more faith, then,” says Dukat. “That’s one of the things I find so charming about Bajorans, really, your faith.”

Kira grits her teeth. “I’d really prefer to see her now.”

She can tell as soon as she says it that she’s pushed Dukat too far. She knows better than this—she had a whole plan. But she’s shaken by the image of that gul digging his fingernails into the line of Meru’s scar.

What if this is the final time loop? What if she’s made everything even worse than it was before?

“Perhaps we’ve had some kind of misunderstanding,” says Dukat.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Kira chokes out.

Dukat smiles, magnanimous once more. “Please, think nothing of it—that party must have been very upsetting for you.”

He leads her into his quarters and over to the dining table. It has been set for two. Hasperat and springwine, exactly like when she shared dinner with Dukat and Meru that previous loop.

Kira sits, scanning the room for weapons. She considers her cutlery, but the knife is not sharp enough to guarantee she’ll be able to pierce his skin. Dukat is wearing a small disruptor strapped to his belt, but trying to get to that could cost her the element of surprise. Maybe if she can get some kind of rope or cord she could strangle him? But there’s too much uncertainty there. She’ll only have one chance to catch him off guard.

“Tell me what you think of the hasperat,” says Dukat. “I’ve really come to enjoy your cuisine during my time on Bajor, but I fear I still prefer my hasperat a bit on the mild side.”

On the other hand, if Kira waits too long to act, he could pin her down before Kira has a chance to stop him, just like that legate did, and Kira has no intention of letting that happen to her ever again.

“It’s good,” says Kira, forcing herself to smile. “Not mild at all.”

What is that gul doing to Meru now?

“I’ll be sure to brag about that to the other officers, then,” says Dukat, pouring Kira a glass of springwine. “Tell me, what do you think of the station so far?”

“It’s very impressive,” says Kira. She runs her finger surreptitiously along the edge of her knife, but it does not even break her comparatively thin Bajoran skin. It will do no damage against Dukat.

“I think it’s fairly drab myself,” says Dukat, leaning forward as if telling Kira a secret. “We Cardassians are accomplished at many things, but sometimes I wish our stations were a bit more inviting. It would make a better first impression on a guest such as yourself, I’m sure.”

Did that gul grow tired of tormenting Meru after Kira left the room? Or has he truly harmed her somehow? Would anyone try to stop him if he beat her, or cut her, or worse? Kira doubts it. All those women are disposable, easily replaced.

“You’re right, it could do with a bit more colour,” says Kira, keeping her voice steady.

There is a glass vase of Bajoran lilacs on the table. If Kira smashed it over Dukat’s head, would that disorient him enough that she could make a grab for his weapon?

“My dear,” says Dukat, eyeing her over the top of his wine glass, “I think your smile is adding some colour already.”

Kira catches his eye, then looks away. She flutters her eyelids. She studies the vase.

* * *

After dinner, Dukat motions for Kira to sit on the couch with him, pouring them each a glass of kanar.

Kira expects Dukat to start touching her, but to her surprise, he does not. Instead, he instructs the computer to play some music, a Bajoran composer Kira is only vaguely familiar with.

“He was from Rekantha Province,” says Dukat. He puts his arm around the top of the couch but not quite around Kira’s shoulders. “About a hundred years ago. Have you ever been there?”

Kira shakes her head. There is an ornamental sword hanging over the mantle. Is it sharp? Could Kira reach it without Dukat noticing?

“Oh,” says Dukat, “now that is a stroke of luck. I was thinking of visiting Rekantha Province myself, this very week. I don’t suppose you’d like to accompany me? I know this little villa, right beside a beach—”

Kira is saved from having to answer by the door chime.

“Enter,” sighs Dukat, and in comes Basso, wringing his hands.

“Sir,” says Basso. “There’s been an incident.”

“Can’t this wait?” says Dukat, glancing pointedly at Kira perched on the couch beside him.

“It’s Gul Makan, sir. He’s requesting that one of the new women be removed immediately. He says she insulted him.” Basso holds out a PADD. “I just need you to sign the authorization and I’ll be gone, sir.”

Dukat holds out his hand, and Basso gives him the PADD.

Kira grabs it from him, scanning the text. It’s in Cardassian, deliberately excluded from the station’s universal translation matrix, so it takes her a moment to decipher the script. But sure enough, there on the screen are names she would recognize anywhere, awkwardly-transliterated from Bajoran to Cardassian, just as she remembers from her childhood. Kira Meru, Kira Taban, Kira Reon, Kira Pohl, Kira Nerys.

She reads on, and her heart sinks.

“You can’t let him do this,” she says.

“I wouldn’t speak to our Prefect that way if I were you,” says Basso, smiling. “It’s easy enough for him to sign one of these forms for you as well.”

“I hardly think that’s necessary,” says Dukat. “She’s just worried about her friend.” He turns to Kira. “But I’m afraid I do need to sign this order. Gul Makan and I—well, it’s politics. Nothing you have to worry about. Let’s just say that it’s best if I placate him right now.”

“He wants her and her family sent to a labour camp because he didn’t like her scar!” says Kira. “A scar anyone could get rid of with a simple dermal regenerator!”

Dukat frowns. “I’m sure it must be more than that. Makan is a reasonable man.”

For the first time in any of these loops, Kira worries not just for Meru but for the rest of her family, her father and her brothers and herself. She tries to imagine being three years old in a Cardassian labour camp. Memories of Gallitep are surfacing once more. The refugee centre was bad enough.

Kira tries a different tactic. “Please,” she says, dying a little as she purses her lips in a pout. “She’s a good friend of mine. I’m sure whatever she did, she just made a mistake, and she’s sorry. Please, for me, will you let her stay?”

Dukat sighs. “Perhaps this is something we can revisit once you’ve settled in. But for now, I’m afraid my hands are tied.” He wrenches the PADD from her grip and presses his thumb to the authorization button.

Basso takes the PADD and leaves.

This is Kira’s fault, all of it. Kira interfered, stopped Meru from catching Dukat’s eye, and just like that, she and her entire family have been condemned to hard labour.

Now Dukat begins to touch her, rubbing feather-light circles along the back of her neck with his thumb. “There, there,” he says, as though Kira is a child having a nightmare, and not a woman who has just witnessed him destroy five lives.

Kira could try to fix this. She could let Dukat touch her, woo her, fuck her, buy her flowers and nice dresses and take her to villas by the sea. And then she could ask him, once they had spent long nights in each other’s arms, if he couldn’t please consider issuing the Kira family an authorization to leave the camp and return home.

Maybe he would do it. Maybe he would even enjoy the opportunity to showcase his generosity, his philosophy of taking a softer hand towards his Bajoran subjects.

Maybe this is what her mother would do, or Seta.

Maybe there would be a kind of bravery in that.

But instead, Kira pulls away, walking back towards the dining table.

“What are you doing?” says Dukat, frowning.

“These are beautiful flowers” says Kira, gesturing at the vase of lilacs.

“They’re Bajoran lilacs. You know, I believe they grow near that villa I was telling you about earlier, if—stop that. Now.”

Kira holds the vase in her hands. It is heavy Cardassian blown glass.

“That’s a very expensive vase. Put it down.”

She begins walking back to Dukat.

“I must say, I’m disappointed,” says Dukat, his bewilderment shifting to annoyance. “I’ve been nothing but kind to you, even removed you from an uncomfortable situation, and you’ve repaid me with incivility and willful disobedience. I’m beginning to think extending a hand of peace and friendship to you Bajorans is—”

In one quick movement, Kira smashes the vase over Dukat’s head.

Dukat stumbles. He is bleeding from a cut in his forehead, rivulets of blood splitting and converging around the bumps and ridges of his face.

Kira runs at him, taking advantage of his disorientation to twist her leg around his, kick the back of his knee and send him sprawling. The move pulls her down with him, and they land together on the broken glass, Dukat on his back, Kira on top.

Kira reaches for Dukat’s disruptor.

He reaches for it as well.

Bits of glass are cutting into Kira’s knees, slicing easily through the thin fabric of her dress. Kira breathes through gritted teeth, ignoring the pain, trying to secure her grip on the disruptor.

But Dukat gets to it first, pulling it from Kira’s grasp and raising it in a shaking hand.

He fires. She ducks. The edge of the energy beam catches her shoulder, and Kira screams before she can stop herself.

White-hot pain. The scent of her own charred flesh. A metallic taste in her mouth.

Kira knees Dukat in the groin. He falters once more, giving Kira the chance she needs to knock the disruptor from his hand. It clatters across the room, out of reach of them both.

She places an elbow on the hollow of his throat, but Dukat throws her off, snarling. He grabs her by the hair and slams her face-first against the floor, rubbing her cheek into the shards of glass. Blood from his forehead drips onto the back of her neck. The puddle of water from the vase is turning pinker and pinker around them.

Kira twists out of Dukat’s grip, using her momentum to slam him back to the ground. One of her legs is unsteady. She tastes blood on her lip.

There are voices outside. This is Kira’s last chance.

Kira grabs a good-sized shard of glass in blood-sticky fingers. She brings its sharpest edge to the hollow of Dukat’s throat and pushes it against his skin as hard as she can. It breaks both his skin and her own. The tendons of her palm sing in agony.

Dukat gasps, gurgling, his hands reaching up to wrap around her neck.

Kira puts more of her weight on the shard in her hands. The muscles of Dukat’s throat give way, slowly and steadily, like a dull knife through gamey meat.

Dukat’s hands fall back to his sides.

His body jerks, then stills.

Guards burst into the room. Kira blinks against the light of the disruptors as they open fire. Her chest is burning. She spreads her arms wide, welcoming annihilation.


	6. Chapter 6

**Twenty-Three**

Kira falls to her knees in the dirt of the refugee centre.

What do the Prophets want her to do?

She does not seem to be meant to save Meru. It was arrogant to think she could teach her mother something, change her somehow. And why did she ever assume that if she altered the events of her mother’s life in some way it would lead to anything better?

But clearly, Kira is meant to do something, something she has not done yet. Otherwise, why would the Prophets be keeping her in this loop?

Kira has a sinking feeling she knows what the Prophets expect of her, but she pushes it aside because she cannot bear it.

She gets up, brushing the dirt off her knees, ignoring both the stares and the averted gazes from those around her. She walks through the cave until she hears her father’s voice calling out to her mother, carrying child-Nerys into their little square of home.

The very first time loop, Kira thought she could feel the hands of the Prophets guiding her. Maybe she did. Maybe she was on the right track that time. Maybe having faith means she should stop plotting everything out and listen to her gut.

* * *

So Kira follows her instincts—and finds herself setting the bomb in Dukat and Meru’s quarters once again.

But this time, she lingers, watches as her mother slips the isolinear rod Dukat gives her into her console. And there on the screen is Kira’s father.

He tells Meru that her sacrifice is saving all their lives. Reon and Pohl are laughing together, he says, and little Nerys is gaining weight. He says Meru is brave, and his whole face is open as he says it, grave and sincere.

That was always one of the things Kira loved most about her father, the serious, genuine way he spoke. He always seemed to consider every word.

Meru’s shoulders are shaking. Kira shifts her position, trying to see her face.

In the recording, Kira’s father tells her mother to find happiness if she can in her new life. He tells her she is in his prayers. He tells her he loves her, will always love her, no matter what.

Meru is crying. Her hand traces the outline of Taban’s face on the screen.

Kira recalls her father as she knew him, the way his gaze would always grow far away when she asked about her mother. She used to think his melancholy was because Meru was dead, but now she knows otherwise. She thinks once again of those extra rations, the bags of grain and cava root and cough medicine tossed into Taban’s outstretched hands each month by some bored Cardassian functionary. How each one must have been a reminder to Taban about where Meru was, what was happening to her.

Kira is not sure she can imagine what that kind of love must have been like.

In the plant beside her, the explosive earring is speeding towards detonation.

“We've got to get out of here,” Kira hears herself say, ushering Meru and Dukat out of the room. “Go! There's a bomb.”

Kira blinks the wetness from her eyes as she hurries after them.

As soon as they reach the hallway, the blast goes off, throwing them off their feet.

There. Kira has made the hard call. She saved her mother. She did not give in to her anger. This must be it, the thing she was meant to do.

Kira holds her mother’s trembling body under her own, shielding her from the shrapnel, and wills herself to open her eyes to the soft candlelight of the temple, the glow of the Orb of Time, the smile of that patronizing vedek.

But when she opens her eyes, she is back in the refugee centre. Sweat and pea soup and distended bellies and despair.

**Twenty-Four**

“What do you want from me?” screams Kira, staring at the blankets hung up around her, the stalactites above her, the cave floor below her feet. “I have my answer! I know what happened! What else are you trying to show me?” She sweeps her arms wide. People are staring at her, but none of this matters, not if she is stuck here indefinitely, reliving the endless darkness of the Occupation over and over again. “Bring me back. Prophets, please, bring me back!”

The cold hands of a Cardassian guard grab her wrists. Cold metal bites into her skin as he cuffs her hands behind her back. The guard leads her down a tunnel, deeper into the Singha caves, one hand wrapped overly tightly on her arm, the other clutching his disruptor.

The guard pushes her into a brightly-lit room. “Another drunk and disorderly.”

“So early in the day?” Another Cardassian sits at a desk, looking at something on a PADD.

“You know how it is with these people,” says the guard. “She was yelling at the ceiling, disturbing the peace, something about the ‘Prophets.’”

The one at the desk snorts. “Bajorans. OK, put her in the north holding cell, I’ll deal with her later.” He goes back to his PADD.

The guard shoves Kira forward, and something inside her _snaps_. It’s as though all she is, all she has ever been, is the churn of violent rage inside her. Rage at her mother, for compromising in ways Kira would never compromise, living in ways Kira would not find worth living. Rage at Dukat, for slithering into Kira’s life so deeply she will never be able to altogether excise him. Rage at every fucking spoonhead who has ever existed and will ever exist, indiscriminate and unfair and absolute.

Rage at herself, for not being able to find a way out of this time loop, for floundering when she was supposed to feel the hands of the Prophets guiding her.

And yes, she realizes with clawing frustration, rage at the Prophets for keeping her trapped in this awful, endless cycle.

Kira turns and kicks the guard in the stomach, sending him stumbling backwards. The backs of his thighs hit the desk, and he winces. He moves towards her, and she ducks to avoid his blow.

Then, before Kira can attack again, the other Cardassian gets up from behind his desk and shoots Kira square in the chest.

* * *

Kira comes to in a holding cell.

The guard must have stunned her—there is a bruise on her left shoulder and a bump on her head, but she is otherwise undamaged, physically at least.

Kira is fairly sure the time loop will start over again soon: it seems to restart at roughly the point at which Kira can no longer have an effect on the life of her mother, and as she sits here, Meru is probably about to be hauled away to Terok Nor. Until then, Kira has time to kill.

So Kira settles into a comfortable kneel on the floor of the cell, relaxing her body as much as she can with her hands cuffed behind her. She closes her eyes, and slows her breath.

She lets her thoughts and feelings rush by like water, acknowledging them, but doing her best not to engage. She focuses on the hard rock underneath her, feels herself supported by the land. And though this is a day when it is difficult to muster gratitude, she extends her thanks to the Prophets for each breath she takes and step she walks.

There is something she is scared of, something buried, denied. Something she is hiding from herself. Kira keeps breathing, waiting for this fear of hers to dislodge itself, and sure enough, as she sinks deeper into her practiced meditative state, it bubbles up to the surface of her mind, and she knows, with awful certainty, what she is supposed to do to escape from the time loop.

Kira opens her eyes, her heart pounding in her throat, all traces of her meditative calm forgotten in an instant.

If the Prophets want her to _forgive_ her mother, she is truly going to be here forever.

**Twenty-Five**

Nevertheless, when the time loop starts over again, Kira resolves to try.

She attempts to tell Meru their first night on Terok Nor that she forgives her for everything, just say the words and be done with it, but absolution sticks in her throat. She still cannot understand why her mother keeps going down the path she does, over and over, first when this happened all those years ago, and again in every time loop where Kira tries to change her. Kira gives her other chances, ways out, ways to reconsider, and every time, Meru picks a life with Dukat.

That isn’t quite fair. Meru’s choices are limited. She is scared.

But weren’t they all scared?

Wasn’t every Bajoran scared for all those decades of the Occupation?

Kira used to wake in the middle of the night before a mission terrified she was about to sacrifice herself for a hopeless cause. She was scared of her father dying, scared of being caught by the Cardassians, scared of cracking under torture, scared of watching her comrades bleed out in front of her, scared of failing her people.

Kira used to be scared all the time, and it never turned her into a collaborator.

Kira lets the time loop play itself out as usual, getting herself sent to ore processing. She’ll have two weeks here before her mother calls for her. Two weeks to get her emotions under control, to do what the Prophets want her to do.

Kira thinks of every time she has ever listened to a vedek speak about forgiveness, its beauty, its healing power. Forgiveness is a gift we give to each other. Forgiveness is a way we walk the path the Prophets have laid out for us.

Of course, there are also those vedeks who say that some things are unforgivable.

Kira is no vedek. And long shifts in the sweltering darkness of Ore Processing Unit Five are not very conducive to contemplating the divine. But nevertheless, Kira tries. She meditates every night before bed, sitting on her bunk in the ore workers’ dormitory and doing her best to tune out the chatter around her. She prays to the Prophets for guidance. She forces herself to consider her anger towards her mother, accept it, and imagine it dissipating like mist on a summer morning. She does her best to open her heart, recognize her own fallibility, hold her mother in compassion and complexity.

By the time Meru calls for her, Kira almost believes she has succeeded.

* * *

“I forgive you,” Kira blurts out the moment she sees her mother.

“You what?” says Meru.

“I forgive you,” repeats Kira, willing it to be true. “I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I judged you. I get it now,” she lies. “There was nothing else you could do.”

Dukat emerges from his office and moves to stand behind Meru, his hand around her waist. Meru leans into his touch. “Are you sure this is the woman you want as your companion?” Dukat says, shooting Meru an incredulous look.

“No,” says Meru, “I don’t think I am.” Turning to Kira, she says, “What could you possibly have to forgive me for?”

Kira wants to tear her hair out. What more is she supposed to say? She has accepted that this is what the Prophets want, and she is doing her best, isn’t she? She swallows. “Look, Meru, can we talk alone, just the two of us?”

Dukat looks at Meru, his eyes narrowed in warning. “My dear,” he says, voice low.

Meru puts a hand on Dukat’s arm. She looks up at him, eyelids lowered, lips pressed into a pout. “Please?”

“Oh, alright. Anything for you.” Dukat rolls his eyes affectionately, and plants a kiss on Meru’s forehead before walking away.

When he has retreated into an adjacent room, Meru looks at Kira and crosses her arms. “I didn’t send for you so you could moralize.”

“I’m not!” Can’t the Prophets see that Kira is doing her best here?

Meru sighs. “I don’t know what kind of self-serving little pilgrimage you think you’re on, but I never asked for your forgiveness, and I’m not asking for it now.”

“Well, I’m giving it to you! I have to!” Kira shouts.

“That’s it,” says Dukat, striding back into the room. “Get out.”

“I can handle this, my love,” says Meru.

Dukat shoots her an exasperated smile. “But you don’t have to handle it. It’s my job to take care of you. She’s upsetting you, so she’s leaving.”

Meru looks as though she wants to say more, but she simply smiles and nods. Dukat grabs hold of Kira’s arm and begins to haul her from the room. Kira feels as though she is scrambling for footholds on a cliff. She’s swallowed her pride, buried her anger, done her best to say what she was supposed to say. She’s been as genuine as she feels capable of being, and it still hasn’t been enough.

When they reach the hall and are out of Meru’s line of sight, Dukat releases his grip on Kira and backhands her across the face. The blow is hard enough that she stumbles before righting herself. Her cheek burns, but Kira will not give Dukat the satisfaction of showing it.

“How dare you speak to my Meru like that? Any other man would have had you killed on the spot,” Dukat hisses. “I hope you realize how lucky you are that I’m so lenient.”

Kira does not feel particularly lucky at the moment, and it is only the faint hope that this could still be her final time loop that stops her from saying so, preferably after spitting in Dukat’s face. But she tamps down her anger as she has done so many times before, breathing into the pain in her cheek, and the deeper pain in her heart.

“Well?” says Dukat.

“Well what?” says Kira, barely suppressing her hostility.

“Did you hear what I just said? You upset the woman I love, and I am letting you live. Aren’t you going to thank me?”

Kira swallows. She feels the way she did standing under the sonic shower after that legate took his pleasure from her, scrubbing at grime that was not there. “Thank you,” she spits.

Dukat is clearly unimpressed with her weak display of gratitude, but he does not push her any further. “Take her back to ore processing,” he tells the guards. “For the next two weeks, cut her rations, raise her quota.” He looks back at Kira and actually winks. “That should keep you out of trouble, hmm?”

As the guards lead Kira away, the world around her begins to fade, the corridors of Terok Nor morphing into the Singha caves once again.

And in that final liminal moment, she hears Dukat’s voice, back in his quarters, asking Meru what she would like for dinner.


	7. Chapter 7

**Twenty-Six**

When Kira finds herself once again back in the refugee centre, all of her emotions just trickle out of her, until she is hollow. Unmoored.

She does not have any more strategies. She does not know what the Prophets want of her. Even rage, her most trusted companion, feels like too much work.

It is lethargy more than anything that spurs her on through yet another time loop. She knows the motions she should go through by now. She protects her family from the would-be thieves, but it brings no vindication, no joy. She watches her father’s face as her mother is dragged away, and she knows none of his despair. Standing with the other stolen women in the cold hull of the transport ship on the way to Terok Nor, it is as though the temperature does not reach her, even as her body shivers.

In their shared quarters, she and Meru have the same conversation they always have, but Kira feels removed from it, as though she is watching the whole scene through a curtain. Meru marvels over the katterpod beans and hasperat, and Kira feels nothing: no pity, no frustration, no fear. Meru tells her about the scar on her cheek, and Kira does not even feel a flicker of anger at the thought of her mother’s face being carved open by an arrogant Cardassian’s blade.

Who is Meru, really? Before embarking on this orb experience, Kira thought she knew, but now that her illusions have been shattered, does she really know anything at all about her mother? What was she like as a child? What was her first word? What are her favourite songs? Does she have friends back in Dakhur Province, or in the refugee centre? Does she like to dance?

Once again, Kira gets herself sent to ore processing her first night on Terok Nor. She almost doesn’t, almost lets that drunken legate take her back to his quarters even though she knows exactly how to persuade him otherwise. What difference does it make, if she spends days toiling in ore processing or nights being fucked until she loses any sense of the magnitude of her violation? Does she really think she’s better than the women she’s leaving behind, Seta and the others, with their board games and dextrous tongues and dirty jokes?

She knows by now that she’s not.

But she does have a preference, if only slightly, for the manner in which she is to be exploited, so she runs at the guards who find her sneaking back to her quarters alone, and as they beat her down and toss her behind the fence inside the Bajoran section of the Promenade, she feels just the slightest spark of life in her, anger and pain.

But even that flickers out a few hours into her first shift in ore processing, leaving her tired and aching and utterly empty.

* * *

When her mother sends for her two weeks later, Kira feels buoyed by a slight sense of curiosity, which is more than she has felt since this loop began.

She has nothing left to try, no tricks up her sleeve, and maybe there is a certain freedom in that. Kira has no more need to convince her mother of anything, or to hurt her, or to forgive her. She no longer expects or hopes that what she is about to do could liberate her from her new eternity. She has nothing to prove, no friends here, no one whose respect she craves. There’s nothing to do but follow her spark of interest.

At the very least, she’ll get a proper meal.

This is how Kira finds herself sitting in Dukat and Meru’s quarters, Dukat thankfully ensconced in his office and out of sight, sipping deka tea and eating alvas with her mother.

Meru’s favourite song, it turns out, is “Another Summer,” an upbeat tune Kira can remember her father singing to her and Reon and Pohl. Meru used to dance to it with her two best friends, Lara and Kel, back in the town where she grew up in Dakhur. Once, when the three of them were sixteen, they broke the new Cardassian-mandated curfew and got so drunk they ended up passing out in a field and being found the next morning by a frantic cousin.

“I was a bit of a handful as a teenager,” says Meru, smiling. “Sneaking out. Kissing boys from the wrong d’jarra, back when that really mattered. Drinking springwine as the sun came up.”

“If you haven’t gotten drunk and watched the sun rising over the mountains, did you even grow up in Dakhur?” says Kira.

Meru laughs. “So I take it you were a bit of a handful too.”

Kira smiles ruefully around a mouthful of fruit. “You could say that.”

“It’s silly, but I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as close to the Prophets as I did when I was sixteen and tipsy and sitting in a moba orchard, watching the sky change colour.”

“I know what you mean,” says Kira, and it’s as though she can almost smell long-ago mountain campfires, taste the rotgut Furel used to make, feel her fourteen-year-old head swimming with tender, drunken awe at the lightening sky of the home she'd sworn to liberate.

Meru looks out the window at the vast darkness of space. “My daughter Nerys is only three now, but sometimes I wonder if she’ll follow in my footsteps.”

“What?” says Kira, frowning.

Meru shakes her head, seeing Kira’s expression. “Oh, just—will she sneak out the way I did, kiss people she isn’t supposed to be kissing, that kind of thing.”

Kira thinks of the time loop where she tried to convince her mother to leave during their very first day on Terok Nor, the way Meru said she wanted more for her children than running and hiding. What would her mother think of the life Kira has led?

“What do you want for your daughter?” asks Kira. “I mean, do you have any hopes for her?”

“I just want her to grow up,” says Meru immediately. “When she was born, she was so small I thought she was just going to wither away in my arms. We were terrified she wouldn’t make it. And I still am. She’s always hungry, although she’s started trying to hide it sometimes, which is—you don’t have children, do you?”

“I don’t,” says Kira.

“Do you want to?”

“I’m not sure.” Kira can’t tell her mother the whole truth: that she thinks she might want children now, especially after Kirayoshi, but she never did during the Occupation. The whole concept felt inconceivable, utterly off-limits.

“I don’t regret it,” says Meru. “It’s—beautiful, like nothing else. But at the same time—I used to think starvation was the worst thing I’d ever experienced. But watching your children starve is so much worse.”

“Oh.” Part of Kira wants to hold her mother, embrace her, but she remains in her chair.

“So really, I just want Nerys to live. After that—I don’t know.” Meru looks out the window again. “Love. Happiness.” Her eyes dart to the closed door of Dukat’s office, and when she speaks again, it is quieter than before. “Freedom.”

Kira feels as though she is drowning. “Do you ever think about what you’d say to her, if you saw her again?”

“If she even wanted to speak to me, you mean? Once she knew I was Dukat’s lover?”

 _Lover_. Exactly how Dukat described Meru to Kira in his late-night subspace transmission, the one that spurred Kira to undergo this orb experience. It feels like another lifetime now.

Meru must see Kira’s wince at her choice of words, because she laughs, short and bitter.

“My little Nerys,” says Meru. “She’s too young to understand now, but she will, someday. And what will she think of me, if I ever see her again?”

Kira is still searching for something to say when Meru continues.

“I know what this looks like, me with Dukat. He’s not what you think—he treats me well, and he really does care about Bajor, in his own way. But I know what people will say. And maybe…” Here she trails off, looking down at her hands, and Kira follows her gaze, examining the smooth skin and cleanly-trimmed nails. Then she looks at Kira and says, “Can I show you something?”

“Of course.”

Meru gets up and walks to one corner of the room. She pulls open a drawer, and takes out some kind of small block, about the size of a PADD. Walking back to where she and Kira have been sitting, Meru says, “Did I ever tell you I was an icon painter?”

Kira searches her memory. This is one of the few true things she does know about her mother, but has it come up before during this time loop? “I don’t think so.”

“Well, I was, back in Dakhur. I'd just finished my apprenticeship when we had to leave—it was the year of all those crop failures, all that runoff from the strip mining, and we just couldn't live there anymore. When Taban and I got to the refugee centre with Nerys, I remember looking around and thinking, if I was stuck here for the rest of my life, would I ever paint again? I mean, you were there too, you can probably imagine.”

Kira nods.

“When he found out I was an artist, Dukat bought me paints and canvases. He ordered them specially from Jalanda City. But I’ve started painting other things besides kais and vedeks and scenes from prophesies. I know you only met my Nerys for a few moments, but...what do you think?”

And Meru shows Kira what she is holding: a canvas. It’s in the traditional Bajoran icon style, but not quite an icon, either. At the centre is a young girl’s face, and Kira realizes with a start that it is her as a child, the child she sees at the beginning of every time loop, shy and quiet and worryingly thin. But this young Nerys is smiling, her face flush with joy. And she is surrounded by flowers, Bajoran lilacs, shooting from her head like points of starlight.

“Oh,” says Kira, struggling for words. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you,” says Meru. She sits back on her chair, setting the picture down on the table. “So if, Prophets willing, I meet Nerys when she’s older, I’d like to give her that. I’ve always been better with paint than I am with words. Does that answer your question?”

And just like that, something clicks in Kira’s mind, her heart, her pagh: not forgiveness, but maybe a kind of understanding. Acceptance.

“I think it does,” says Kira.

Meru says something else, but her voice is already fading. The time loop is starting over again. Kira braces herself for the dark, damp cacophony of the refugee centre, the onslaught of violences both small and immense that will follow.

But when she opens her eyes, she is sitting on her knees on the floor of the temple, warm and clean and well fed. In front of her, the Orb of Time glows, bathing her in golden light.

Quickly, Kira closes the casing of the orb. She sits back on her heels. She breathes, in and out, and when the tears come, she lets them flow.


	8. Chapter 8

**Epilogue**

“I’ve always hated collaborators,” says Kira, staring out the window of Sisko’s office. “I mean, what could be worse than betraying your own people? During the Occupation, if I ever had any doubt about what their fate should be, I would think of my mother, how she gave her life for Bajor. She was a hero. They were traitors. It was that simple. Or so I thought.”

Sisko follows her gaze, looking out at the expanse of stars. “And what do you think now?”

Kira swallows. “There’s a part of me that still hates her.”

“And another part of you that doesn’t?”

“Something like that.”

“It sounds like she loved you a lot.”

Kira looks at Sisko, bracing herself for judgment in his eyes, but she finds that his face is perfectly placid. Kira feels an awful urge to push him, to show him just how ugly her thoughts can be. “Me and Dukat both.”

But Sisko just shakes his head, pensive. “You know that’s not the same.”

“Maybe,” says Kira.

Sisko pauses, hesitating. “I’m going to tell you something you’re not going to want to hear.”

“I know,” says Kira. “If I hadn’t felt so much hatred towards my mother I could have escaped the time loop a lot sooner.”

Sisko frowns. “No, that’s not what I was going to say at all.”

“What, then?”

“I was going to say that Starfleet has counsellors.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Kira laughs, shaking her head.

Sisko nods. “If you change your mind, I could put you in touch with the woman I talked to when Jennifer died. I was skeptical too, at first, but I found her to be refreshingly...I think you’d call her ‘no bullshit.’”

“That’s very kind of you,” says Kira carefully, trying and failing to imagine herself sitting in some cushy office pouring her heart out to a stranger in a Starfleet uniform.

“And you’re sure you don’t want some time off? You know, you really have a lot of unused leave time.”

“I’m sure.”

“Alright. Oh, and one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s good to have you back.”

Kira snorts. “From your perspective, I was only gone a day.”

Sisko smiles. “Even so.”

* * *

“You should take a vacation. Oh, don’t give me that look, I’m serious.” Dax sits down across the Replimat table from Kira, handing her a raktajino.

Kira hunches her shoulders. “You know I’m not good at vacations.”

“I’m not talking about my kind of vacation. You don’t have to go to Risa. Just get off the station for a while! Aren’t there any parts of Bajor you’ve always wanted to see? You could hike or something, meditate on a mountain top, I don’t know.”

Kira laughs. “We’re in the middle of a war!”

Dax sets down her mug and takes Kira’s hands in her own. “And none of us will get through it unless we take breaks sometimes.”

“Thanks,” says Kira, pulling back her hands to clasp her own mug, “but I think I’d rather keep busy.”

“OK then, what if you were busy somewhere else? Go to Bajor and take some paperwork with you.”

“Well now I think you’re just trying to get rid of me.”

Kira expects Dax to laugh, but she just purses her lips. “Nerys. You’ve just spent what felt like months to you stuck on this station back in the Bad Old Days. Maybe it would be good to get away from all that for a bit.”

“I can handle this station just fine,” says Kira, more harshly than she means to. She feels a twinge of guilt—Dax really is just trying to help, and Kira can’t even say for sure that she’s wrong in her suggestion. Kira is just frustrated.

“You can handle a lot of things,” says Dax. “Doesn’t mean you have to.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll think about it.”

“At least let me drag you to the holosuites tonight.”

“You just want an excuse to try out that new hot springs program.”

Dax claps a hand to her chest in mock-dismay. “Oh no! You’ve uncovered my secret plot to have fun with my friends.”

Kira makes herself smile for Dax’s benefit, but halfway through the movement it becomes something she’s doing for herself as well.

* * *

“And that’s when I realized I was back in the temple,” says Kira. She wipes her eyes with her sleeve; she gave up trying to stop her tears about halfway through recounting her story.

On the screen in front of her, Shakaar is silent for a long moment. Kira’s stomach twists further into knots with every second. She shouldn’t have told him any of this, or maybe she should have given him a simplified version, a version with some of the edges smoothed out. Now the First Minister of Bajor, her comrade and leader and ex and friend, is judging her, and it’s too late to take any of it back.

But then Shakaar shakes his head, laughing bitterly. Kira remembers that laugh. It’s a laugh for the bad days, the days when there’s too much damp for a fire and your boots are soaked through and you’ve been chewing on bark all day to trick your body into thinking there’s food. It’s a laugh that means things are grim, but it’s also a laugh of solidarity.

“This shit just never stops, does it?” he says, and Kira has to laugh right back.

“I guess not,” she says, but anxiety is still twisting like a knife in her belly. “But Edon, honestly, what do you think? Tell me, I can take it.” If his opinion of her has changed in some way, she has to know.

Shakaar stares straight into the lens of the camera on his console; straight into Kira’s eyes. “I think your mother deserved better. You deserved better. We all deserved better.”

“You don’t think I was wrong, the way I acted?”

“For not forgiving your mother? Or for not hating her more?”

Kira cracks a smile. “Take your pick.”

Shakaar is silent for a moment, and Kira glances at the vase on her dresser: the lilacs. Kira has not been able to make herself throw them out, but nor has she been able to make herself replace them, so there they sit, wilting in the dry station air.

“I think,” says Shakaar, slow and measured and utterly unlike one of his flashy political speeches, “that there’s a certain kind of person we had to become, with the choices we made. And there’s a certain kind of person your mother had to become as well.”

“A collaborator,” says Kira. She wants nothing to go unsaid, not now.

“I think you and I had to become the kind of people who would believe that to the bitter end, to do the things we did. And I don’t regret the things we did.”

“Neither do I.”

“But it’s still...limiting, sometimes.”

“Yeah,” says Kira softly.

“Have you talked to a vedek about this?”

Kira shakes her head. “Not yet.”

“Could be worth doing. Especially because you’re angry at the Prophets, too—and don’t try to deny it, I know what that look in your eyes means.”

Kira sighs. “You’re probably right.”

“But Nerys?” says Shakaar. “For what it’s worth, if it’d been my orb experience, I think I would’ve done pretty much the same.”

“I guess you taught me well.”

And though Shakaar is barely a decade older than Kira, suddenly he looks impossibly ancient, his gaze far away. “I guess I did.”

* * *

“As you know, many of the records from that period were purged when the Cardassians withdrew, but I’ve been able to find some possible matches,” says Odo.

Kira settles in to her usual seat in the Security office. “Let’s hear it, then.”

Odo nods. “Your mother—”

“Died in a Cardassian hospital seven years after she arrived on Terok Nor,” says Kira. “That’s one record I’ve been able to track down on my own.” She frowns. “Wait. Did you ever meet her?”

Odo shakes his head. “Before my time.”

Kira finds she is relieved at that; one less discomfiting fact to try to slot into her life story. “Right.”

Odo navigates to the next page of records on his PADD. “The legate who—well, who took an interest in you—”

“You can say he raped me.”

Odo winces. “I wasn’t sure—”

“It is what it is.”

Odo nods. “Alright. There were several legates stationed on Terok Nor during its early years who matched the description you gave me. But if he’s who I suspect he was, it looks like he died two years ago, back on Cardassia Prime.”

“And you’re not just saying that so I don’t hunt him down and kill him?”

“Would you like to see for yourself? I have his file.”

Kira steels herself and nods. Odo holds out the PADD. Kira looks at the image on the screen, and just like that, she feels a surge of adrenaline shoot through her, her heart pounding, muscles tensing, whole body ready for a fight. She sets down the PADD with a shaking hand. “Yep, that’s him.”

“Nerys, are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” Prophets, Kira has no idea how to even begin to process all _that_. “Who else did you find?”

Odo gives her a long, hard look, and for a moment Kira fears he will insist that they stop. But then he says, “After that, things get murkier, I’m afraid. But I think I may have found your resistance leader, the one who gave you the explosive earring.” Odo clicks through on the PADD again, then shows Kira another picture. “Halb Daier—look familiar?”

The image is a mug shot, and the man looks even more beat-down than Kira remembers, but she’s pretty sure he lines up with her memories. “I think he’s the one,” says Kira.

“Executed, I’m afraid. Accused of leading an attempt to sabotage the ore processing centre.”

“Oh.”

“There’s one more possibility I found, but this is by far the most tenuous. I don’t have a picture. But there’s a record of a Bajoran woman named Dura Lin whose age would be right for the Lin you told me about. She was taken from Terok Nor to the estate of Gul Makan one year after your orb experience took place, and her transit authorization pass listed her title simply as ‘recreation.’”

Kira shudders. “And what happened to her?”

“Died in a Kohn-Ma bombing along with Makan a few months later.”

“And that’s it?” Kira isn’t sure what she’d been hoping for when she’d taken Odo up on his offer to look into the fates of the people she met in the time loop, but it was something more than this.

“That’s it. No sign of this Basso character, although I’m fairly confident he was gone by the time I arrived on the station.”

The lack of a record for Basso could mean he successfully weaseled his way out of any consequences for his collaboration, but Kira decides right then and there to believe that it means he was just never very important after all.

“What about the other Bajoran women? Seta?”

Odo shakes his head. “Nothing. The Cardassians seem to have been especially thorough with purging those kinds of records.”

“They’re probably mostly dead by now.”

Odo shrugs. “Most of them would only be in their 50s today. It’s quite possible some of them are still alive, if they were lucky. But if so, none have chosen to speak publicly about their experiences.”

“I can’t say I blame them.”

“Maybe you could speak up for them.”

“That might do more harm than good.”

“Perhaps. But I think you might be able to find a way to do it right. If you needed a project.”

Kira laughs. “The last thing I need is a project.”

Odo considers her. “Alright. But I know sometimes when I feel...powerless, it helps to seek out justice for someone else.”

Kira nods, considering. She isn’t convinced any of the women would want that, though, and even less convinced she'd be the right person for the job.

Odo makes his throat clearing noise. “Do you want to keep talking about this, or would you rather move on to today’s security briefing?”

“The briefing,” says Kira with a grateful smile.

Odo nods. “Two more instances of vandalism in the turbolifts, but it does not appear to be politically motivated.”

Kira scrolls through the report on her PADD as Odo keeps talking. Gradually, her breathing returns to normal.

* * *

Kira walks the length of the Promenade, taking in the scene before her. It’s 2500 hours, and even this late in the evening the place is bustling, laughter spilling from shops and restaurants, people of countless species walking and chatting and enjoying the night.

It’s been a week since she returned to DS9, and still she finds herself walking around the station each night, unable to sleep until she has made her tour.

Everyone Kira has talked to seems to have a different suggestion for what she should do to recover from her orb experience. Vedeks and counsellors, vacations and causes. She should probably consider them all. But for now, all she’s been doing is making her way around DS9 every evening, putting one foot in front of the other.

The Promenade is first, to see its bright lights and smiling people, the lack of a fence separating it in two. Then she’ll head to what used to be the main room of the ore processing centre, now simply a storage area, to breathe in the cool air and stand blissfully still in a way she never could on all her endless work shifts. Finally, she’ll walk the upper corridors of the Habitat Ring, her movements unrestricted, her footsteps sure as her dignity, until she feels the urge to sleep finally begin to descend.

It’s a process. But she’ll survive.

She always does.

“Mama, can I have one, please?”

A Bajoran woman and a young girl are standing in front of a sweet seller’s stall, his last customers for the night. Kira stops to watch as the woman hands her daughter a jumja stick and the girl takes it in both hands, beaming up at her mother as she brings it to her lips. The woman has a bag slung across her back, and she smiles and beckons for the girl to keep walking. They must be catching a late night transport to Bajor, the mother buying her daughter a treat for the journey.

That woman lived through the Occupation just as Kira did, but her daughter did not.

What did the woman do all those years? Was she here on the station when it was Terok Nor? Perhaps she was a farmer watching her crops slowly fail as mining effluents contaminated the soil, or perhaps she was a scientist at one of the universities, or a cleaner on a military base, or a member of a resistance cell. Or maybe she was plucked from her family one day and forced to fuck Cardassian officers as they fucked her planet in turn, and maybe over time she made a life for herself with one of them, spent seven years living comfortably with a gentle-handed gul and called it happiness.

Kira is not naive. Children like the girl with the jumja stick, the first generation born into an independent Bajor, will not be entirely free of the Occupation. She’s read the stories, sat through the debriefings: parents raised in labour camps who think discipline is synonymous with a closed fist, or who retreat into bottles of synthale while their babies cry, or who teach their children their strange obsessions with food.

But still, this girl’s childhood will be so radically different from Kira’s own that it is hard to believe they are from the same planet.

Kira keeps moving, but instead of seeking out the fragments of the ore processing centre, she finds herself on the second level of the Promenade, looking out the window. Stars dot the expanse of space, and there in the distance she can see Bajor, its waters and its continents, green and blue and white.

That young girl will grow up learning about the Occupation in family stories and ceremonies, books and holoprograms. History will make meaning of it all, weaving all those decades of brutality into a narrative, pulling out themes, illuminating nuances, holding it in all its complexity.

It is different when you live it. You have to think in black and white. People are with you, or against you. It’s the only way you can make it through.

Kira is not sure if she’ll ever be able to forgive her mother, not fully, even if she does think she understands her now. But maybe that young girl will be able to forgive her own mother, or even be able to recognize that there is nothing she needs to forgive her mother for.

And maybe that’s what Kira was fighting for all along.

Kira stands at the window for a long time. She does not know what has been keeping her there until she sees the transport ship take off, heading for the surface. She had to watch over them, she realizes, wait to make sure that mother and daughter made it off the station safely.

Kira closes her eyes and thanks the Prophets for the gift of a future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is actually the longest fic I've ever completed, and writing and posting it has been a whole journey, one that's taught me a lot about the stories I like to consume and to tell. So thanks for reading! [Here's my tumblr](https://aliceinthinkland.tumblr.com/) if you wanna say hi--if you talked to me about this fic it would totally make my day!


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